


The Long Run

by tiffany rawlins (wearemany), wearemany



Series: The Long Run [1]
Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-06-23
Updated: 2002-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-16 03:06:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/tiffany%20rawlins, https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/wearemany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So a guy walks into a bar...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Run

_In the morning when you rise  
Do you think of me and how you left me crying?  
Are you thinking of telephones and managers  
And where you've got to be at noon?  
You are living a reality I left years ago  
It quite nearly killed me  
In the long run it will make you cry  
Make you crazy and old before your time  
And the difference between me and you  
I won't argue right or wrong  
But I have time to cry my baby  
You don't have to cry  
_  
\-- Crosby Stills & Nash

I.

 _This is the joke:_

Every day starts the same. Chris gets up around ten, takes the dogs out for a run along the lake. Three miles, doctor's orders, and then he scrambles two eggs and eats breakfast in what the last owners called the sun room. It's a glass-walled area at the back of the house and even on cloudy days he can see halfway to Michigan. Chris calls it the lake room. Graciela, his housekeeper, calls it _la sala de vidrio_. No one else has much occasion to speak of it.

He spends another hour after breakfast working out, Stairmaster and the bike and squats against the wall because the stronger his quads are, the less his knees hurt, and then he showers, dresses, and drives into the city. He's usually at the bar by two, sometimes just before Claude, the manager, gets there, sometimes right after.

Every day at the bar starts the same. Claude says, "So a guy walks into a bar," and Chris tells him a joke. If the joke's a little funny, Claude smirks and tugs at one of his long dreads, his creased black face crinkling around the eyes. If the joke is really bad, Claude shakes his head and says, "Oh, man, man." If the joke is actually really funny, which isn't all that often, Claude waits a second, then nods seriously and says, "Yeah."

They talk about the bands that played the night before, about the crowd, about how many days it's been since the sun's shown through the gray matter that hangs over Chicago five months out of the year. Chris is the only one who lives someplace cold and for a while he thought that was a self-punishment trip, but he's spent almost three years there now and he's happy more days than not.

Most days that's all nestled safely in the past, anyway. Best years of his life and all that and last month he turned forty. If this is what the rest of his life looks like he figures that's okay. It works for him.

  


 _So a guy._

Claude buzzes upstairs. "Someone's here to see you," he says, and Chris marks his spot fifty pages into Hemingway's complete short stories. He could read at home, he could stay at home all day and night if he wanted, because he's still got a fuckload of money in the bank and Claude does a pretty good job of running things all by himself. But Chris likes to feel like he goes to work, like he has a job to do, even if most days he locks himself in his big office on the second floor and works his way through every book by an author in chronological order. So far this year it's Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Plath, Wilde, and now with Hemingway he'll start on the short stories and move on to novels.

He uses the torn edge of an old flyer for a bookmark and climbs down the stairs, wincing a little because he maybe overdid it this morning with the running and working out. Twenty-first century and all and you'd think they'd be able to replace a couple of worn-out knees so they'd work right again. Down the stairs and around the corner and he stops short when he sees who it is.

It's Lance. Lance fucking Bass is standing in his bar. Lance motherfucking Hollywood Bass is standing in his bar wearing ripped jeans and a leather jacket. He's got a black duffel in one hand and a hanging bag slung over the other shoulder. Lance Bass, standing in his bar, with two bags and no clue, and it's like a joke.

"Hey," Lance says.

Chris blinks and watches Claude stack shot glasses on a shelf. Lance is standing in his bar like it hasn't been six years, like he isn't the guy whose name Chris has silently cursed ever since the phone rang and Justin went back.

Chris turns to Claude and says, "So a guy walks into a bar."

  
 _So a guy walks into a bar._

It's been six years since he's seen Lance and eight years since the five of them decided to quit while they still could and Chris blinks again, shoves his hand in a pocket so he doesn't actually rub his eyes to make sure Lance is real.

"Forty looks good on you," Lance says, smiling, and he knows Lance is real. Always open with a compliment, that's what they learned in pop star boot camp, how to make twelve-year-olds your fans and influence record execs. Lance grins on one side of his mouth. He puts the duffel down and says, "How's the view where you're standing?"

Lance and his snarky tone are definitely real. But maybe all the rest of it's not, Chris thinks, if they're just standing there in his bar and talking like guys do.

"Fine," Chris says. "Good, good, it's fine," he says, and then nods at Claude. "Uh, can you --"

"Sure." Claude picks up a stack of invoices off the bar and heads upstairs. Lance shoots him a look that might mean he's impressed and Chris feels like an ass. No way to run a place like this without a guy like Claude and he just dismissed him like the hired help.

Chris kicks at the wood floor and a jolt runs from his toe to his knee to his hip and he thinks the view from forty is maybe different than he expected. He looks up and Lance has set down the hanging bag and seems kind of nervous. "We said," Lance starts, and then sighs deep and shaky and that part's real. It's really real, maybe too real, and Chris takes a step forward, then stops himself. This is Lance, after all. "We always said, if we needed. If we had to. That we'd be there."

Chris takes another step and the rest of it's all bullshit, it's been a long time and Justin went back but Lance is in his bar about to cry and the rest of it just blows away like smoke.

"I'm here," Lance says, and Chris puts a hand on his shoulder.

"Okay," he says. "You're okay here."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar and puts down his bags._

Lance leaves his luggage in the middle of the floor and claims a stool like there's a line of people around the block trying to beat him to it. He puts his elbows on the counter and holds his face in his hands. His hair is dark brown and his bent neck is exposed and soft and vulnerable.

Chris steps behind the bar. He needs something to do with his hands so he straightens the angle of the taps, blows water through the gun, knocks a couple of glasses together.

Lance raises his head and Chris says, "So. What happened?"

Lance grimaces.

Chris has seen Justin once without Lance, at some awards thing maybe five years back. Lance was there, someone said, in some other room, and Justin had tugged on Chris' sleeve and furrowed his brow and said, "You doin' okay?" and Chris said sure, fine. Good.

"He doesn't exactly call me," Chris says, and Lance nods slowly.

"It's over."

Chris thinks he figured that much, what with the bags and the hangdog look. "When?"

"I don't." Lance rubs his thumb into the curved dark wood and Chris wonders if maybe Lance doesn't want to look up and see his reflection in the mirrors. When he meets Chris' eye it's with a tight, bitter frown. "I don't remember when it wasn't," he says.

Lance looks his age, Chris realizes. Finally. Looks thirtysomething, has crow's feet around his eyes and he's got a tan but that doesn't really smooth the wrinkles at the edges of his mouth. They're laugh lines but they look out of practice.

Chris slaps a coaster on the bar. "Lemme make you a drink."

Lance says, "No, I." He clears his throat. "I don't."

At that award show, Justin was sky-high, and the next day some paper ran a blind item about a curly-headed singer-actor belting out "Cocaine" at the afterparty. Chris points his index finger and 7-Up shoots from the soda gun and runs down the drain. "Okay," he says. "Shirley Temple?"

Lance squints, annoyed, and that at least is familiar. "I'm not, Chris, I'm not five," he says.

Tall glass with Coke and a lemon twist and Chris sets the drink in front of Lance with a flourish. "You got a story goes with that?" he asks.

Lance flicks a finger at the thin straw. "Not a good one."

Chris runs soda into a tumbler and they bump glasses after an awkward, mid-air pause. "I don't either," Chris says. "Now, I mean."

"You got a story?"

"Nah," Chris says. "I just. Just quit." Woke up on day sixty-seven of his trip around the world and couldn't remember the last time he'd been sober for a sunrise and just quit.

Lance takes a drink and leans back a little, his shoulders looser. "Occupational hazard?"

"Or something, yeah," Chris says. He'd been happy as a silent partner until Jake died and Jake's wife wanted to sell. Chris bought her out three years back, and he can mix drinks like a pro but mostly books bands and reads in his office. "Gotta make peace with yourself sooner or later," he says, more truthfully. "Later, I guess."

Lance nods sincerely and Chris thinks, AA. Lance went to celebrity AA or some fancy rehab clinic and why shouldn't he, god knows he can afford it. Of any of them it's Lance who's probably got a billion bucks stuffed under his mattress. Chris isn't opposed to paying people to help out, he's just not very good at it.

Lance stirs ice in the now-empty glass and nods again. "Later's better than never," he says.

Chris coughs and runs his finger through a drop of Coke on the bar. "Want the nickel tour?"

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags and has a drink_.

Chris has always liked how his bar looks during the day, when it's empty. It's not as magical, there's no thrumming bass, it's just a big room with a lot of wood and an empty stage. Sometimes he's got bands up there auditioning for one of the local artist opening act slots or doing a soundcheck but still the songs echo, no audience to muffle the sound.

"VIP room," he says, nodding at the balcony as they climb the stairs. "The money guys sit here" -- two desks in a windowless office -- "and Claude and the shift managers are here." Claude looks up from his desk and Chris introduces Lance as an old friend.

"You were one of the guys in the group," Claude says.

"One of 'em, yeah," Lance says, and Chris keeps the tour moving.

"And on our right we have the Lincoln Bedroom," he says, and Lance actually cracks a grin, looks around. Chris split his band stuff between work and home, so there are a few platinum albums on the wall, a few award statues, a couple nice framed group portraits by the better photographers. Shots of runway models in FuMan clothes, a shirt signed by the whole staff after the last big show. A photo of Dani and her kids is on his desk next to one with all his sisters and theirs from Christmas two years ago.

Chris has never had someone in his office who knew all the faces in all the pictures, other than his mom and even that was before he'd really settled in. "How's Diane?" he asks, suddenly. That's the kind of thing you talk about with old friends, their folks, their sisters. No use wondering if they're still standing in front of the Herb Ritts photo because they miss their boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Whatever. As long as Lance doesn't start crying.

"Good," Lance says, but he does sound choked up, at least a little. "And Stacy and Ford, and my dad, yeah. They're good. Yours?"

"Yeah," Chris says. "Everyone's happy and healthy as a horse."

"So this," Lance says, looking around. "This is what you do."

There's something in Lance's voice that still doesn't make sense to Chris. It's not defeat. It's not hate. "Yeah," he says.

"You're doing well."

"I do okay," Chris says.

"You've got another, right? Toronto?"

"Yeah," he says. "It does just fine when I leave it alone." Maybe it's resignation, Chris thinks, or maybe that's how he sounds when he talks about the past and it just bounces off Lance like harmony used to.

Lance walks out of the office and Chris follows. Lance is leaning on the balcony surveying the space below, and he turns. "Just the two bars?" he asks, and Chris nods. Lance shakes his head in disbelief. "You could have made a killing," he says.

It's distance, Chris decides. Lance is very, very far away from this moment, this place, this time. Chris squeezes the bridge of his nose and steps back. "Yeah," he says. "How'd that work out for you?"

Lance grips the railing tight and doesn't answer and it's like Chris is watching himself watch Justin walk away, except that was in LA and it was years ago and they'd only had three months. Lance and Justin had eight years together, almost nine, and Justin will probably call and Lance will go back. Chris doesn't know why Lance is here, why it's him and not Joey or Diane even, but it's him and they promised and he lays a hand on Lance's shoulder. "I'm supposed to go hear this band play across town," he says. "Throw your shit in my office and I'll let you buy me dinner on the way back."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink and takes a look around._

Dinner is four courses of traditional Italian in the back room of this place owned by a lady Chris knows from waiting around the office of the state liquor authority. It's still early even after the semi-crappy rock band audition and Lance and Chris have the space to themselves. A pretty girl who's maybe his friend's daughter pops her head in every five minutes to see if they're okay.

They're okay. Chris is okay, at least, he's over the shock of still Lance after all these years and has officially tabled the question of why him and not Joey, no matter what, or Diane or --

"Oh," he says. "Have you talked to JC?"

Lance hasn't, and the way he says it sounds like Lance realizes maybe JC's not a guy whose life he can walk back into quite so easily. JC's in Italy, probably on some boat with his boyfriend, this guy whose dad owns half the ships in the Mediterranean. Lance nods like, of course, of course that's where JC is. Nobody calls it running away but Chris knows part of what JC ran away from was the kind of light Justin and Lance turned toward when left to their own devices.

"So you, he, like, calls? You talk to him?" Lance asks.

"He still calls at four in the morning," Chris says. "He doesn't really get time zones."

"I, in Germany, I remember," Lance says. "I tried to explain the international date line and he thought it was a way to pick up chicks."

They both laugh a little and Chris wonders how long they have till they run out of things to laugh over. Ten years of being a band so maybe between remembering the old and catching up on what came after they've got a while. They have a lot of after.

Lance tries to pay for dinner before the check even comes and Chris gets to say, "Don't worry about it, we're taken care of here," and something in that feels good, feels successful without being an asshole, and Lance nods.

Back at the bar, Lance sits at the end of the counter and watches Chris greet the bands, introduce the night's acts, shake hands and point out people for the bartenders to comp. Chris feels him watching, feels that cool green gaze slide across the back of his shoulders. Feels it slither away sometimes when there's a cute guy draping himself over someone within his sight range.

Chris grabs one of his waiters around the waist, this young blond guy named Dylan who always flirts like it's gonna get him a raise. Dylan smiles at Chris and shouts over the din, "Your friend is hot." Chris shoves his chest playfully. Dylan's barely legal to work there and he was maybe fifteen when the group broke up. He doesn't seem to recognize Lance. "No really," Dylan says, leaning in again. "I'd do him."

Chris thinks he feels Lance's stare like a laser on his back and he lets Dylan go, but when he turns around Lance is just picking at his fingernails and stealing glances at his watch. Chris taps him on the arm. "You wanna bail?" he says.

"Sure," Lance answers, too quickly, and catches himself. "I mean, yeah, if you're, if you're ready."

Upstairs, Chris takes the duffel and Lance hoists the hanging bag and then stares at his shoes.

"I should probably, just, you know, tell me a good place cause it's been a while since I've been in Chicago and I'll --"

"Don't be an idiot," Chris says, and Lance looks up. His eyes are shining and he looks all of sixteen fucking years old again, like his mom just got on a plane by herself.

Lance says softly, "Don't be a jerk."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around and says he'll buy you dinner._

They don't talk in the car, Lance just watches waves crash on the beach under the moonlight as they wind their way up Lake Shore Drive. Chris can make this drive with his eyes shut at three a.m. after the bar's closed up, even when it turns into Sheridan and the road weaves through thick trees and big lots with bigger and bigger houses spread farther and farther apart.

He opens the gate with the remote and drives slow the rest of the way to the house, thinking about Manderley and how Daphne DuMaurier really didn't write all that much at all. Though The Birds was one hell of a scary movie and he never walks down to the water without thinking of Rebecca.

His garage is a triple and the only other thing in there is his bike. Lance gets out and stands by the trunk until Chris unlocks it and they carry the bags in through the side door. He's been in the house for nearly three years and there are things that must seem out of place to someone who knows Chris lived in crappy apartments longer than he should have, but also longer than he had to. Chris will probably stay here but you might not know it for looking.

The house is big, not huge, four bedrooms and a den. The big living room is the music room now, with a baby grand JC bought from Richard Marx and then left to Chris for safekeeping, and built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with records and speakers, the only thing Chris has ever really spent money on. The three dogs rush to greet them and Jenny, the little one, jumps all over Lance, licking at his jeans. Lance drops to his knees for a second and the other two dogs crowd around him, sniffing. They go through the big, open kitchen and a dining room he never uses and there's a deck with wooden stairs down to the private beach. Actual art on the walls, some stuff JC did but mostly things he found on the eighty-day grand tour, and all the group trophies and albums are in his office again, a wide, high room with books and a drawing table and a speakerphone on a round table. Mostly he reads his books and plays with the dogs but once those things were necessary for Chris to do the work he'd thought would come next, until he remembered that just meant whatever he wanted to do that day.

There's a picture on his mantle in the living room of himself on top of Machu Picchu. It's his survivor picture, that's what he always calls it. All those fucking stairs and it was really the last gasp for his knees but it was after Justin went back and he needed to prove he wasn't dead, so he did it alone. He didn't go back to Peru on the big trip because he knew he'd never make it all the way up again and that wasn't the kind of truth he was looking to find by then.

Lance doesn't say anything, just nods and points and nods and lingers in front of things for reasons Chris doesn't understand and isn't sure he wants to.

At the top of the stairs, Chris says, "Take this one," flipping on lights in the room at the far end of the hall. "It's got its own bathroom and everything should be clean."

"Before," Lance says, and Chris tenses. They have a lot of before, too. "I didn't, you're not a jerk."

"No, I know." Chris means it when he says it but then he's not so sure, because there's Lance lost and lonely in his big house and Chris doesn't know what the fuck that means Justin is doing or how much he cares. He thinks he's a little out of practice with juggling so many emotions at once. Juggling so many people.

"I mean, you're," Lance gives Chris half a hug and their chests touch briefly. "I'm just here and you're being really, you're. You're not a jerk and I don't deserve this and I don't want you to think I don't know that."

They have a lot of before to get through, Chris thinks, and maybe they'll have to do that before they can laugh easily at all the rest.

"I go running," he says, the words out of his mouth before he can stop them. "In the morning, I take the dogs out and we run. Should, do you want me to get you up?"

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home._

Lance is sitting on his living room couch wearing track pants and a hooded sweatshirt when Chris comes downstairs. He'd stood in front of the guest room for five minutes debating whether he should actually wake Lance up and there he is, ready to go. Chris feels late.

Late and, yeah, Lance looks pretty fit. He nods hello and Chris says, "Okay, so, when I said I go running every morning?"

The corner of Lance's mouth lifts slightly.

"What I meant was, it's like, two miles walking and a half-mile jog. And then another half-mile walking."

"Okay."

"Doctor's orders," Chris mutters, pointing at his knees, and Lance just says okay again.

Chris feels like an old man walking next to Lance. The dogs run on ahead and Chris keeps a brisk pace but he can tell Lance is coiled like a spring. There's a bounce in his walk, but it's not joy, it's impatience, and Chris figures that's what he probably looked like all those years ago back when he was the hyperactive one.

"You don't," he says finally. "You should go your own speed here, man." Maxim, the Great Dane, bounds up with a stick between his teeth and Chris wrestles it free, throws it down the beach. "Go ahead," he says, looking at Lance.

Lance stands on tiptoes and rubs his arms. "It's just, man, it's fucking cold here," Lance says and smiles.

He chases after Maxim and Chris looks down to where Jenny, the little Corgi, is looping circles around his ankles. "Let's go catch up, sweetheart," he says, but they don't meet again until Lance has doubled back.

Lance puts his hands on his thighs and catches his breath. He stands up, sniffs the air and casts around like one of the dogs in patch of wild grass. "What's that smell?"

"Gary," Chris says.

"Who's Gary?" Lance says this like he's waiting for the inevitable punchline and Chris thinks some things never change, he's always had a joke at hand. Lance was always a pretty decent sidekick.

"No." Chris points south. "On windy days you can smell the steel factories. Gary, Indiana."

Lance hums The Music Man, "Gary, Indiana, my home sweet home." Chris sings the last three words over him, high on low, harmony like their second language. On good days, maybe their first. "Lord," Lance says. "Can you imagine that being where you live?"

"That'd be even worse than whatever happened in LA, I bet," Chris says, kneeing Maxim in the chest and biting down at the pain. He glances up and Lance has gone all distant in the face again.

"What happened in LA?" Lance says.

Chris swallows. "To you. You two."

Lance bounces up and down again and kind of jogs in place. When he stops, he looks at Chris and says, "I'm not sure we can blame that on LA. I think, uh. He. We did it to each other, I think."

It took Chris six months flat on his back after replacing both his knees and eighty days around the world to get that far. He thinks maybe Lance wasn't being dramatic, after all, when he said he couldn't remember when it wasn't over, and then he thinks maybe he doesn't know a damn thing about it. He takes a stick from Maxim and throws it far out into the water where he knows the dog won't chase it.

Lance wrinkles his nose again and looks down the shore. "That smell is seriously foul."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast._

Chris can't remember how Lance likes his coffee. Which isn't that big of a deal, because when he sets the cup on the breakfast bar, Lance asks for sugar and now he knows.

But then he realizes he can't remember how Justin liked his coffee. Ten years on the road and three months locked away in the same hotel room in Beverly Hills and Chris thinks it's those little things you know like secrets that make it feel as if no one else has a clue what it's like in your world.

Chris can't remember how Justin liked his coffee or his eggs or if he ate the crusts of his toast. But he thinks if he holds his breath and stands very still, he can still feel Justin's hand on his lower back as he sat up in bed to sign for room service. Three months in a hotel in Beverly Hills and he should have known it was doomed for that fact alone. The best years of his life hadn't been far enough behind him yet to think he and Justin would have trouble taking ten years of being best friends and making something more of it.

Graciela comes in through the front door, keys jangling on a cord around her wrist, and Lance jolts up off the stool. She's already halfway through a story about the new gardener when she stops, sees Lance, back in his seat drinking coffee. She smiles apologetically.

Chris introduces Lance as an old friend staying for a while and Lance takes her hand. "Mucho gusto," he says, and makes small talk with his housekeeper for an annoyingly long time. Chris is pretty sure Lance didn't used to speak Spanish. He remembers sometime toward the end, there was a benefit in Mexico for an earthquake or flood or some natural disaster and Chris was still the only one who could barter for anything more complicated than tequila.

It's a smart business move on Lance's part, he guesses, turning around to grab eggs and milk out of the fridge. Lance's accent is perfect and Chris scowls at the neat rows of condiments on the shelves. He probably hired some private Berlitz tutor so he could make even more money. Probably they have classes or shit like that at Betty Ford.

By the time Lance has asked after Graciela's family, her kids, her house and the work she does for "el viejito con las rodillas malas," Lance says, with a slim smile at Chris across the counter, Chris is done making breakfast. Chris bares his teeth and snarls in return and they all laugh.

He hands a plate of steaming eggs to Lance. "Let's eat in the lake room."

"La sala de vidrio," Graciela corrects.

Two chairs pulled out at the long oak table instead of one and it's been a while. Chris tries not to stare at Lance like he's an alien, doubling his planet's population in one fell swoop.

Lance stops a bite halfway to his mouth, sets his fork back on the plate. "I didn't -- I never asked. If you live alone."

He sounds exactly like Justin the way he says it, how Justin was always operating on simple assumption and then apologetically backing his way out of it. At the beginning, the very beginning, before they all started sounding the same, Justin and Chris had always passed verbal tics back and forth like a cold. Chris taught Justin to swear in six languages and if he didn't watch himself, Chris caught that same earnest tone Justin wore for interviews.

"I live alone," Chris says.

Lance puts a hand face down on the table. "Always?"

Chris swallows half his coffee at once and burns the roof of his mouth. "Yeah," he says.

Lance looks around the room again, squints in the flat, white morning glare. "There's -- is there someone?"

Chris got laid on Saturday, three days before. Keith, this guy he met in physical therapy. Keith broke both arms and his collarbone in a car accident last year and the first time they fucked he was still in casts. He gave Chris the best blowjob of his life and laughed heartily when Chris called him "my armless lover." Keith lives way down in Hyde Park and it's been almost three months of every other Thursday and the occasional Saturday but no one's ever stayed the night. So there's someone. Sort of.

"Sometimes," Chris says.

"That's, that's good," Lance says. "I'm glad to hear it. I mean, you know, of course you do, yeah, it's been so... I just, you know. We didn't really know."

Chris knows "we" means "me and Justin" and he knows that once he would have slapped Lance upside the head and demanded an explanation for whatever he'd done to fuck things up, whatever he'd done to make Justin walk around like someone'd kicked him in the nuts. And Lance would have told him, and Chris would have said Lance was being an asshole and that he should apologize, and Lance would have. Even when Lance or JC bitched about it, they did what Chris said when it came to Justin because Chris was the only one who really knew what would work.

They'd been doing that in one combination or another since the first days in Orlando. Five guys who mostly loved each other but in different ways at different times, and even then it's five guys all thrown in a house or a bus or a hotel. No matter that you love each other, or how, that's bound to cause some kind of problems at least some of the time. Six years since he's seen Lance, five since he's seen Justin and maybe an eon or two since he understood how to keep all the balls in the air.

Chris thinks maybe it's still easy, or it could be. He could just say, tell me about LA, and maybe Lance would, and maybe that's all he needs, a little time, a little space, an understanding ear. That way when Justin calls and Lance goes back they won't fuck it up again. Maybe Chris drew the short straw and someone forgot to tell him.

Lance is staring out at the lake like there's an answer in the way ill-formed waves crash and fall on the rocky beach and Chris decides that when Lance wants to talk, he'll talk. Until then Chris isn't gonna ask why him, why now. He's out of practice with this shit.

"I gotta go into work," Chris says finally, pushing his chair back. "You wanna stay here or what?"

Lance sniffs and looks back from the lake. "Um, I'll. Yeah, I think I'll just chill, if, is that cool?"

"Whatever, dude," Chris says. "You need anything, just ask your new bestest amigo and she'll hook you up."

Lance turns his head away. "Amiga," he says, and he makes it sound like a ballad.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while._

Two weeks and Lance has bought a new winter coat with a brown fake fur collar, new boots, and four sets of hats and gloves.

"It's not the fucking Arctic," Chris says, home early because there's no band that night. Lance's shopping bags are all over the living room couch.

"I found an outlet mall," Lance says, shrugging. "I was thinking, you know, I might buy a car. People, it's a little strange to take a limo to the mall around here."

Chris wraps a lime green cashmere scarf around Lance's eyes like a blindfold and bops him on the head. Guy like Lance can probably buy new cars like scarves, and when it's out of season he pays someone to cover it or take care of it. "There's room in the garage," he says.

Two weeks and Chris hasn't asked and Lance hasn't told and every morning Lance runs ahead with Maxim and Sophie, the middle child mutt, and meets Chris on the way back. Breakfast and then Chris drives to the bar, tells Claude a joke and reads Hemingway. Hemingway was a fucking prolific writer and there's so much in every line that Chris is reading slower than he has in years. It's harder to concentrate when there's so much in every line.

When there's a band to audition sometimes Lance comes down with him, or meets him wherever, and they have dinner before or after the bar opens at five. Twice Lance has sat at the end of the bar and watched Chris do his thing. Every other night, Lance has been up when he gets home, sitting on the couch reading or poking idly at the piano or just staring out the big windows. Once Lance was maybe crying but he wiped his eyes and asked Chris how his night had been and they didn't talk about it.

Lance pushes the scarf up on his forehead and blinks like wool's caught in his eyes. Wooly eyes, Chris thinks, mornings on the bus Justin always had wooly, sleepy eyes like he'd cried himself to sleep. He wonders if Lance is crying himself to sleep, if Justin is thinking about this all or if whatever it is they did to each other in LA made him a totally different creature, some hardened guy Chris wouldn't recognize if they ever did see each other again. The last time Chris saw Lance was some dinner party a week before the breakup, the first breakup, and between then and now he's grown some kind of plastic casing, Chris thinks. So maybe the Justin that's left isn't even related to the fourteen-year-old Chris had chased through Disneyworld in a golf cart. The ex-girlfriend Chris had sweet-talked into looking the other way while he lifted the keys was waiting at the finish line, laughing, and Justin had given her a piggyback ride because he lost.

Lance blinks and grabs Chris' forearm suddenly. "You're gonna tell me when I've overstayed my welcome, right?" he asks.

Chris looks at the tissue paper spilling out of bags and the coat hanging on a hook in the hall and Lance in sockfeet on his couch. All this time since he's seen Lance and a couple of decades since they met and these two weeks have been like a millisecond.

"Fuck, man," Chris says, knuckles on Lance's head like they're still kids. "I'll just charge your ass rent. You can afford it."

Lance laughs easily, lightly, like it's a hundred years ago. "Okay," he says, and lets go of Chris.

"Watch out," Chris says. "This kind of star treatment don't come cheap."

Lance ties the scarf around his chin and sticks out his tongue. "It never does. Do you take American Express?"

Lance shows up the next day at the bar and drags Chris by the wrist to see the sleek silver 1963 Avanti parked illegally out front. He's wearing silver glasses to match and it's mid-December but the sun is out and Chris can see how Lance owned every room he walked into back in California. His smile's so bright it almost makes winter in Chicago seem like a joke.

Chris talks Lance into putting the car in an expensive garage and then they listen to a couple demos over the sound system. Lance has a really good ear for all that, has always known it takes more than a pretty smile and a decent voice, Chris remembers. Justin had both but there was something about seeing his face on a movie screen that pulled him away, and Lance had as good an eye as he'd had an ear so once Justin was taken seriously for something it was all she wrote.

Claude yells down from the second floor that there's a guy on the phone about the liquor order for the holiday party. "You think we'll have more people this year?" Chris asks, and Claude says yeah, goes back to the call. Lance quirks an eyebrow and Chris says, "Dude, Eddie Vedder's coming by. He's the surprise guest, so, shh."

"Who'm I gonna tell?" Lance says, with a little bit of a smile.

"Good," Chris says, "cause you're his date."

Lance rolls his eyes. "Yeah, me and grunge go way back."

"I'm serious. I'm gonna have way too much shit to do that night without being on babysitting duty. Besides, you, don't you know him or something?"

"We've met," Lance shrugs. "You've met him, I'm sure."

"It'll be fun, Lance, come on. You got other plans or something?"

Lance stares straight ahead. "When," he says. It's in a week. Lance doesn't have other plans.

"You didn't think you were getting a free ride, did you?" Chris asks.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride._

Chris comes home early one night that week, there's a band but Claude's got things covered so he can leave if he wants. Lance has made dinner. Graciela set the table in the lake room, Chris can tell from how the flowers are arranged, but it all looks nice and normal and almost frighteningly domestic.

"What'd you break?" Chris says, coming back to the kitchen, and Lance turns around. He's got an apron tied around his waist.

Lance smiles and shakes off the question. "Sit," he says, spearing meat and laying it on some kind of potato on a big pewter serving dish that Chris doesn't remember buying but guesses must be his.

"Can I --"

"Sit."

Chris sits, and around the corner and down the short hall he can hear Lance humming under his breath and talking to himself or maybe at the saucepan, telling it not to burn just because he used water instead of wine. There's a salad already on the table and the Christmas lights Graciela hung up reflect off the glass. Chris can see his reflection in the inky void and he squints, trying to make out the expression on his face. His eyes dart up and Lance is standing behind him, no apron, arms full of food. Chris sees himself smile at Lance and Lance smiles back and Chris thinks it's the opposite of distance, maybe. It's presence. Nearness.

"Eat," Lance says, and Chris doesn't make a Tarzan joke because it's some kind of pork chop stuffed with something that smells divine. It tastes better. It tastes better than anything Chris has had in months, maybe years, and he feels heady and drunk but it's just Lance refilling his wine glass with Perrier.

"Okay, seriously," Chris says, enunciating very carefully because he thinks that his mouth is maybe numb from overstimulation. "What'd you do?"

"I watched Joey's show today."

"Joey made stuffed whatever-this-was on his show today?"

"No," Lance says. "Or, well, sort of. He made it with lamb, but you didn't have any lamb. And anyway I just, um. You know. Wanted to cook. Or do something. Or something."

"I was kidding about the no free rides thing," Chris says. "I mean, good food, good eats, good god don't let me stop you from cooking every night if you want, but you really. You don't, I don't expect." Chris closes his mouth. Sometimes that helps.

Lance swirls the sparkling water and it spins in eddies around the lime at bottom of the glass. "I know."

"Shit, Lance, it's nice having you here. You know."

Lance swallows the rest and smiles softly. "Thanks."

Chris rubs his belly and tries to remember the last time he ate like this. "You talked to Joe?"

Chris and Joey talk, more than Chris talks to any of the others outside of the last few weeks with Lance there. Joey and his two daughters, two different moms and no wife, two big houses and Joey in his own place square in the middle. Family and the Food Network and it's half cooking, half talk show and people love it. Joey makes his own rules, as usual, and makes it look so damn appealing that people's only question is how to make it work for them, too.

"Um," Lance says, but Chris knows already. Chris and Joey talk, but Lance and Joey do not, not really, not in a while. A long while. Lance says, "I was thinking, you know. Maybe I'd go down there for, um, the holidays. For Christmas."

"You planning to stand up Eddie Vedder?" Chris asks.

"No, I just. After that. After this weekend. You're gonna go see your mom, right, and I thought." Lance shakes his head, looking down at the table. Chris looks in the window and back at himself. Three weeks and he still hasn't asked and Lance hasn't told but Chris feels full and confident and like maybe he has something to say on the subject.

"Lance," he says. "You can't keep just showing up on people's doorsteps, you know. People you don't, I mean, people you don't even really talk to anymore."

"I know," Lance says, biting his lip. There's a streak of some reddish spice along his left eyebrow and when Lance touches his face reflexively it smears.

"You're not. What about Mississippi?"

Lance shakes his head, hard, like he's trying to break his own neck or something and Chris lays a hand on Lance's forearm. "I'm not, Chris, I can't, I can't go home. I. My mother."

Lance is thirty-three years old and he's run away from home, Chris realizes. He's run away and he's afraid his mom is gonna yell at him for not making things work with his little pissant of a boyfriend, Chris thinks, and then puts his hand to his mouth. Sometimes even when he's not talking out loud that helps.

"Come with me," he says instead. "I usually leave the morning after the party and, yeah, you should come. We can take your shiny new car if the weather holds."

Lance sighs. "Okay. Okay, yeah. Okay. And, uh."

"What."

"I didn't make dessert, I just realized."

"That's it," Chris says, and Lance's head pops up. "You're so fucking fired. I'm getting me a new houseboy tomorrow."

Lance pushes his plate to the center of the table. "Fuck off," he says amiably. "I'm a good deal and you know it."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful._

Three days to his party and Chris has forgotten how much work throwing a big shindig is, even with a staff and it's not like owning a bar isn't kind of like throwing a party every day. Even so. Even so, he's glad to have Lance around. It didn't take much staring at the TV and going to the mall and buying things that slowly filled the guest room closet for Lance to get bored, so he's been helping Chris plan things.

Chris comes downstairs, Hemingway on hold because the goddamn phone hasn't stopped ringing for two hours straight, and Lance is holding an order slip up in a delivery driver's face. "Do you see twenty-four cases here? Because, there are four stacks of five, so unless you've got four more in your truck, this is not twenty-four. This is twenty. Twenty."

"Lance --"

Lance puts one hand up in Chris' direction but doesn't look away. Chris really kind of hopes Lance is overcompensating for not having had any real work to do in a while. It's been a while since Chris was in LA but he remembers now that he didn't just leave because Justin went back, he left because it was hard to stay and not sound like that, too.

The driver shifts from foot to foot and finally mumbles. Lance leans forward with restrained intent and the guy says, "Lemme call and see if the other truck can bring the rest by today."

"Good," Lance says, turning around. "Hey," he smiles at Chris.

"You know, uh, usually Claude or one of the shift managers handles this kind of thing." Chris isn't sure he's read a packing slip since maybe his first month in Chicago, since he realized Claude really knew about a hundred more times about running a bar than Chris ever would. Jake had been the only one out of all the old friends who came calling for a piece of the action who Chris had liked to start out with. He asked for some cash down on this little bar in Chicago to bridge that city's old-school blues establishment and its impossible-to-kill indie rockers.

It was the kind of favor Chris liked having the means to accommodate. He did enough business with friends already and Jake got that, sent quarterly updates, never asked for a penny more and tried a couple of times to pay off the loan. But Justin had gone back and his knees were wrecked and Chris said, "It's good to have a backup plan," and offered to throw in another chunk of change if Jake ever wanted to try something more. Jake was happy with what he had.

"Claude had to go deal with the catering people," Lance says. "There's some, like, new strain of flu or something and half your waitstaff is out sick so he's hoping they can cover with extra folks." Lance shrugs. "How's it going up there?"

Chris shakes his head. "It's, it's fine. One of the managers is being a dipshit about dressing room space."

"You don't have a dressing room."

"Yeah, well, exactly. I told him his twelve-year-old wunderkind guitarist could have the walk-in freezer all to himself if he needed a place to jerk off."

Lance snorts. "Sometimes," he says. "It's like, sometimes, do they honestly think we haven't heard this before? I can't tell you how many times I had some girl walk into my office like she could get whatever role she'd set her pretty little heart on just by throwing some attitude."

"They have no idea," Chris says.

The driver comes back in from making his call and tells Lance the extra beer will be there by three. Lance manages to smile when he says thank you and Chris decides he's just glad to have the help. It's not LA but Lance is a quick study, he can maybe unlearn all that like he picked it up so quickly before.

Claude comes back ready to bash all twenty-four cases of beer over the head of the caterer and it's Lance who hmmms and huhhhs and leans across the bar and tells Claude they'll work it out. Chris goes back up to his desk, makes three calls and when the phone doesn't ring again right away, opens his book.

"Oh, I see how this works." Lance doesn't knock and Chris kicks his chair back and almost flips over. He slaps the book shut and tries not to feel guilty. "I'm pretty much just doing your job for you here. Or is Hemingway writing bar guides now?"

Chris rubs his shin where it connected with the desk top. "Hemingway's dead. But this one takes place in a bar. What's up?"

"So," Lance says, sitting down. "I figured out the staffing thing. I think."

"Okay." Claude really deals with all this stuff, but Chris thinks he said that already.

"Here's the deal. You can have eight of the waiters from your good pal Charlie's club for the night of the party if you'll loan him three bartenders tomorrow." Chris just stares at him. "What? It's a good trade. And, really, he's happy to do it, cause he's totally up shit creek otherwise. I could've gotten him to promise his first-born if I'd wanted. You get what you want, he gets what he wants, our problem is solved, call it a day. I'd say let's go have a martini at Lola's but, yeah, you know. A long way to drive for somethin' we don't drink anymore."

"We," Chris says, and when he tries to sit back he slams his left knee cap against the desk and curses under his breath. He looks up and Lance is leaning forward, one palm on his edge of the desk, waiting. Chris breathes in through his teeth and waves a hand to say he's okay. "You, you wanna go to this thing tonight? I have to go to this club in Lakeview and see this guy who runs the bar association and kiss his ass a little and, you know. It's a party thing."

"Sounds like LA," Lance says, and Chris thinks, twice in two minutes. "Only we'll have fun," Lance amends, and Chris nods.

They go to the thing in Lakeview and then to another thing in Lincoln Park because it's that time of year and everybody and his fucking cousin is throwing a holiday thing. Chris says, "This is Lance," and sometimes adds, "We were in this little band together," with a smile if he knows the person. One lady says it's great they're still friends after all this time. One guy looks from Chris to Lance and back to Chris and just says, "Who knew?" Chris does a pretty piss-poor imitation of the guy's bowlegged walk when he's gone but Lance laughs at his jokes like how JC always would. JC always laughed, and Lance would just raise an eyebrow and wait till later, then try to one-up him like they were a couple of comedy writers sitting around a sitcom set.

Lance finds two more guys willing to work Chris' party as long as they get the VIP area and Chris doesn't even want to know how that happened exactly. Everywhere they go, Lance asks for Coke or 7-Up or tonic and lime with an easy smile and Chris just drinks whatever Lance is having because if he thinks about it too much he remembers how some things are easier when you've had a few. Chris nods across the room when he's bored and Lance touches Chris' elbow softly when he's ready to go.

Two a.m. in Lance's Avanti because they drove in together that morning and Lance really is a quick study. He handles the curves like it's his own private road. Chris stares at the streetlight thirty yards out and then the next and the next until he almost feels drunk. He leans his cheek on the cool glass of the window and says, "So are we gonna talk about him? Like, ever?" Chris closes his eyes because he doesn't expect a reaction. Of all of them Lance always had the best poker face and Chris doesn't figure that all these years Lance spent making girls sign on the dotted line made him any worse at saying only what he wants.

"Well," Lance says, stretching the word.

Chris knows the only reason he ever beat Lance at poker was that he was more stubborn. He waits.

"I figure," Lance says after a few miles. "He got enough already. Enough time."

"Glad to see you didn't grow out of holding grudges," Chris says.

  
"I'm not. I'm -- how long did it take you?"

"To what," Chris says stubbornly.

When Lance finally looks away from the road it's with a cool, even stare.

"It took a little while," Chris admits.

Brake lights up ahead and Chris puts a foot down on the floormat. Lance slows with two quick taps to the pedal. "How long?"

Chris loosens his fists. "Fucking longer than it should have, okay?"

Lance pushes the heel of his hand up on the wheel and they glide around a row of flares in the damp street. There's mist on the windows and the lights from a police cruiser split and reflect like a kaleidoscope.

Lance breathes in through his nose, intense and loud even above the rebuilt engine. "That's probably more than enough, then," he says.

Chris closes his eyes again and the asphalt is a steady hum that shakes his bones and rattles his teeth but it's soothing, it's familiar, it's every road they took from here to there. Lance touches his shoulder when they're pulling into the garage and he comes awake, if he was asleep. Maybe he was just lost again. "Chris," Lance says, voice rumbling in the small car. Chris blinks and they sit until the garage light turns itself off. Lance dances on the brakes in a familiar rhythm and the crimson glow bounces like a strobe.

"Chris," he says again. "I don't, I don't think talking about him really. It doesn't help. Me. But." Lance rubs his own mouth and squints a little. He faces Chris and stares him straight in the eye. "I loved Justin for a really long time. I loved him after we'd, long after we'd kind of stopped knowing why we were still together. Okay? And it's, he's maybe not even really why I left. I don't know. That was maybe only part of it. I don't know, I'm not saying I have it all figured out. But I knew him for half my life and loved him for at least half of that and it's just. It's just enough."

Chris holds his breath. He isn't sure why, he isn't sure what is happening, but somehow he thinks breathing might interrupt it. So he holds his lungs tight and his arms still and tries not to swallow even when his throat burns. And then Lance opens his door, gets out and goes into the house. Chris gasps and shakes a little and hits his fist against the dashboard and, when he's done with that, locks the door behind him even though the car is plenty safe in the garage.

 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things._

Chris thinks maybe it took him longer to get over Justin than he is used to admitting, even to himself. He doesn't think about it much, though, because holiday parties are a pain in the ass. Every year he forgets this until it's too late, and every year he swears it'll be the last time he thinks it's a good idea to have three hundred people pack into the bar and wait for some super-secret special guest to show up. He never remembers that, though, not when he can taste snow in the air for the first time after a broiling Chicago summer.

The day of the party, Chris wakes up at dawn. He goes downstairs and finds Lance leaning with one hand extended on one glass wall of the lake room. Standing there like that, shoulders full and strong, a long, clean line running from the cords in his neck down to where his hip peeks out between an old Popodyssey shirt and sweats, he looks like a young man again. Chris wonders when he started thinking of Lance as old. If Lance looks old, he must look positively statesmanlike. Or like a fucking dinosaur.

Thick carpet in the living room makes it impossible to hear someone coming up from behind. Chris fists a hand in his shirt and clears his throat. There's early morning sun glinting off Lance's steel green eyes and light reflected from the water below plays across his face and Chris clears his throat again. Lance's smile breaks like a wave and Chris can't help but wink back, no matter how tired he is, no matter how much his knees ache on cold, sunny mornings.

It's winter in the city of broad shoulders, and no matter that he's just remembered that the most important things, Lance only talks about once. It's been that way a long time, maybe ever since Joey sat at the end of a conference table with a clenched jaw, saying "this isn't just some girl, I can't ask her not to have it." It's not that Lance pretends the conversations never happened. He adjusts, changes, leans in instead of out. But once it's crossed his lips it's finished business. Its allotted disruption has expired, and so everyone else said congratulations, too, because that was what Lance had decided was the right answer. Chris thinks if he'd had that kind of emotional control after Justin he might have more to show for all the years after the best years of his life.

Lance smiles and Chris smiles back, he can feel the fiendish grin on his face, no matter what they've talked about. Lance says Justin's had enough time and Chris decides to believe him for now. "It's gonna be one long-ass day," Chris says.

Lance nods. "Maybe we should skip the run." Chris is pretty sure that Lance could run ten miles and make it till four a.m. without breathing hard but the same's not true for him. But Lance still insists on calling it a run and not taking el viejito out for some fresh air so Chris takes both as a gift and agrees. Somewhere between thirty and forty he learned there's a difference between pity and the kind of attention that comes wrapped in concern. Every evening they stand in the hallway and say goodnight and when Chris wakes up Lance is there, ready to run and eat and flirt with Graciela. It's been almost a month and then tomorrow morning they leave for Pennsylvania and his mom's. Justin's maybe gotten enough of them both.

Maxim bounds up and puts his paws on Lance's thighs, barking. "I gotta take them out," Chris says. "You want to eat downtown today?"

An hour into the party and Chris suspects he might be having something that resembles fun. Eddie Vedder and his wife are hidden away with Lance up in Chris' office. Lance says everything with a cool authority when he's at the bar, this professional voice that makes him want to be a star again because when Lance talks about it what he remembers most are all the good parts. Carey, the twelve-year-old who's actually really almost seventeen, he swears, is almost as cute as Justin had been at that age and hangs on every word Lance says.

Chris wonders if that's really how Justin used to look at him. "It's like you're the only one who speaks his language," JC said once, in exasperation because it was a day that Justin was driving everyone crazy. And Chris can't remember why, he has absolutely no idea what it was that Justin had done but he's never forgotten what JC said or how it never sounded like a compliment. Maybe that's why Chris remembers it so well.

There's a lot Chris doesn't let himself remember. Still, all that, how sometimes it's like having Lance around means that things he packed away a long time ago are on his fucking mantle or something, all that and still an hour into the party Chris is having something that feels a hell of a lot like fun. He circles through the main bar, the VIP balcony, over to his office with a quick nod at Lance to make sure things are going okay, and then back again. Everything's going okay with Lance.

Chris comes back down the stairs, really glad now that they'd gone for breakfast instead of working out because his knees are fucking killing him and, no, no quick shot of bourbon behind the bar to numb that, not doing that. Chris recognizes the back of Keith's head from twenty feet back and thinks, fuck. Fuck. Forgot the designated every other Thursday fuck and that doesn't mean anything, he's just been busy, but there's Keith and Chris remembers that he'd invited him way back when things seemed like maybe they'd be more than sometimes. He's on his way over to explain about the busy stuff and Claude grabs his elbow, wants him to talk with the opening act's manager.

When he doubles back a half-hour later, Keith is gone and Chris swears to himself he'll call when he gets back into town. He takes another swing upstairs and Eddie and the wife are sitting in a booth now, listening to the band, ignoring the spreading whispers when even the polite VIP types realize who he is and why he's there. Chris opens his office door and there's Lance. And Keith. Lance and Keith, talking, which is kind of weird but really shouldn't be, it's been a while but not forever since Lance met some guy Chris was sometimes fucking. Though back then it was mostly girls.

"Hello there," Chris says, and Keith stands. Lance is sitting behind the desk like it's an interview and Chris wonders what he asked, what he knows about Keith now.

Keith smiles widely and kisses Chris on the cheek. Over Keith's shoulder Chris can see Lance watching them. "I couldn't find you," Keith says, and Chris remembers that the second or maybe third time they'd hooked up he'd brought Keith back here for something to eat and they'd fucked on his office floor.

"Gotta press the flesh," Chris says. "You know how it is." Keith is a salesman, or was. Chris thinks he's some kind of vice president of something now, so he probably doesn't actually go door-to-door with a briefcase anymore. If he ever did. He doesn't actually know much of those kind of things about Keith, but then again he knows things like how Keith's sister, who'd been driving the car in the accident that put Keith in therapy, is lying in a coma in a long-term care facility in Skokie. So it's not like they don't know each other. Somewhere between thirty and forty Chris decided maybe the group ruined him for women but really no one's been an all-star contender in a while. Keith's not a bad guy.

"Yeah," Keith says. "Lance was telling me that things have been pretty nuts and that's why you'd been working out at home instead of coming in." Keith saying Lance's name so casual, like they've all been friends for years, is kind of funny and Chris laughs maybe a little too loudly because Lance's head pops up.

"I'm gonna go make sure everybody's behavin' themselves," Lance says, pushing back.

"Well, it's a party," Chris says. "So don't let them behave too well."

Keith says "real nice to meet you, Lance" like he's closed a deal, and they shake hands across Chris. Lance closes the door behind him.

"Hey," Chris says again, because Keith up close smells good, sweet cologne instead of post-workout sweat and soap. Not that he doesn't like that, too, but this is nice, somehow more grown-up and real and Chris puts his hand on Keith's bicep and kisses him. Keith is taller than Chris by a fair amount, and real broad through the chest. He pulls Chris to him and Chris lets himself fold into Keith's arms. Chris thinks he's spent so much time with Lance these past weeks, Lance who is taller but not much, still trim and curvy like he's been for years, that he's stopped feeling his size the way he does with Keith.

Keith breaks the kiss and touches Chris' jaw. He says, "I thought maybe you were blowing me off."

Chris swallows. "I was --"

"Busy," Keith says. "Yeah, your friend said."

It's a weird note for Keith to try for, this kind of jealous thing. Way out of range, Chris thinks. "You were on a first-name basis a few minutes ago."

"I didn't even think you guys were close," Keith says, sitting down again. Chris goes around the desk.

"We're. It's been a while," Chris says. "He and..." He stops when he realizes that he has no idea if Lance has told anyone else about Justin and the breakup, but if Keith thinks he has some idea of who's who after all these years, probably he doesn't need to know this. Chris doesn't cover his tracks, doesn't really care who knows who he sleeps with but then again it's been a while since he was on the cover of a magazine. Lance and Justin, Justin especially after the big movie came out, never went into retirement. "He's just visiting for a while."

"Okay," Keith says, evenly. "You want to have dinner next week?"

There's a break in the music downstairs and Chris glances at the clock, calculates how much longer before he can go home and ice his knee. "I can't, I'm --"

"Busy." Keith crosses his arms.

Chris looks at the photo of Dani on his desk. Dani and her three kids with her husband, this nice guy named Chad who isn't ever too busy for her. He doesn't have a tenth as much to do as he did those days and he's maybe still too busy for Keith. "We're going to my mom's tomorrow, for Christmas," he says, "so I'll probably still be gone."

"Okay," Keith says, rising, and Chris thinks, they never made a deal here, Keith shouldn't act like they've broken up, but he doesn't say it. "If you want, when you get back," Keith says, "call me. If you want." Chris just nods, and after ten minutes of reading and rereading the jacket copy to The Old Man and the Sea, there's a knock at the door.

"Yeah," he shouts over the din below, and Lance comes in.

"The guest of honor's almost up," Lance says, and Chris gets up. "I, um, I think Keith left, also."

"He's a busy guy," Chris says, taking off his suit jacket and hanging it on the back of his chair. "He sells things."

"Not very convincingly," Lance says, and smiles. "You ready for the slam-bang finish?"

Eddie's never really gotten over thinking Neil Young is his long-lost dad. So he and the band sing "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Southern Man" and "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" and then he calls Chris over for the encore. Chris pulls Lance up by the shoulder on his way to the stage and they share a mic for "Love the One You're With," hard and fast and rocking like Stephen Stills is there in spirit. Eddie's flying around the stage but Lance and Chris just sing right into each other's faces. Lance loops an arm around Chris' neck and it's been a long time since they did this but before that it was the best years of his life and he never really forgot what that felt like or stopped trying to get it back.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different._

Lance has deemed the weather clear and dry enough that they can take the Avanti and they're on the road by one, which isn't bad at all given that they didn't get home from the bar until almost four in the morning.

"One thing I don't miss is the fucking hangovers," Chris says, and Lance hums in agreement. Chris wants to ask how long it's been for Lance, what hitting bottom looked like after so long on top and if he spent the whole night before wanting a drink, too. Chris thinks maybe Lance has more motivation to stay sober, something more than stubbornness. But he's not sure if Lance can talk about drinking without talking about Justin, so he doesn't say anything else, and neither does Lance, and the Indiana dunes rush by on their left. Lance digs in his shirt pocket for sunglasses and Chris leans over to hold the wheel steady.

"I got it," Lance says, when he's done, and Chris lets go. Whoever owned the car last put in a modern stereo, thank fucking goodness, so for the first leg, down through Chicago and around South Bend, Chris mostly plays DJ. It's not the quietest ride Chris has ever been on but Lance isn't really in a talkative mood, it seems, and Chris puts his head back and sleeps a little.

It's dark by five and Lance convinces him they're close enough, they should drive until they get there. They switch places in Toledo. Dinner somewhere before Cleveland at this Mexican place advertising free margaritas all night and Chris pulls in the lot before he realizes. They drink coffee and Chris takes the last stretch, too, because this is the part he knows.

"Did you ever drive cross country?" Lance asks lazily, at the crest of a hill. His head is propped on one of Chris' sweaters against the window and Chris looks away from the road for just a second.

"Other than the eight thousand fucking times we did it on tour, you mean?"

Lance chuckles. "Yeah, like, before that. Or after?"

"Yeah." Chris waits, for a second, and then he remembers that Lance doesn't ask unnecessary questions any more than he answers them. "Yeah, in, I don't know. I was twenty-one, twenty-two. I was in Florida, and me and this girl I was, I thought I was in love with, and her sister moved to San Francisco, so we went out to see her. We had to take her this, like, this fucking humongous African violet, I remember."

"Mmm," Lance says.

"Annie," Chris says. "That was her name." Chris looks over and Lance is smiling with his eyes closed and Chris thinks about how his mom told him once that when the girls were crying she'd vacuum the house because it made a noise like babies hear in the womb. Relaxing, oceanic, pre-natal and Chris thinks maybe that's what the road sounds like to them because of all those years.

"You've traveled a lot," Lance says, not a question. He opens one eye and looks over. "All the -- you've got all those pictures in your house. All those things, the masks and the rugs and everything."

"Yeah," Chris says.

"Where'd you go?"

Chris watches the center line disappear over and over and over like Morse code and remembers driving through Eastern Europe by himself in a little old Mercedes. "I went everywhere," he says, and Lance sits up a little, scrubs at his eyes.

"Everywhere where?"

"Everywhere everywhere," Chris says. "Around the world in eighty days. Maybe four years back? After the surgery. Too much fucking time on my back, you know? I was ready to gnaw my arm off from all the fucking self-awareness."

"You did it alone?"

"You know, I actually really loved traveling alone. I wasn't sure, you know, I'd never really, we all always went everywhere --"

"I meant." Lance coughs a little and then fiddles with the heater. "I meant, you know. Your knees."

"I paid a nice man with a medical degree," Chris says. "You think I'm really that crazy?"

"Sometimes," Lance says. "I was asking, who took care of you after?"

He takes care of himself, then and now, Chris thinks. It works better that way. "JC came for a while," he says. "The first couple weeks, when I couldn't tie my shoes or walk or whatever. I went to this specialist in New Mexico, so I was there with Jayce for a while, and then I went to Florida and Joey came by to make me dinner every few nights."

"I didn't even..."

"Yeah, I know," Chris says. "It's no big deal. I wasn't good company anyway."

Lance is quiet a while. "So that picture, on the fireplace? Of you at Machu Picchu. That's after that? You climbed all that after?"

Chris laughs and tries not to sound bitter. "No, man, no. That was before."

"Oh," Lance says. "Okay."

"That was the first time I decided Justin'd had enough," Chris says, and Lance says "oh" again softly. "I guess I just had a little trouble remembering it."

Rain that might soon be snow or at least sleet spatters on the windshield and Chris fumbles for the wipers. "Under, on the left," Lance says. Slick arcs across the glass and then Lance says, so quiet it's almost swallowed by the sounds of the car, "I forget sometimes, too."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different, but he doesn't have all the answers._

Chris maybe forgot to tell his mom Lance was coming with him. Everyone's asleep when they get there and the note on the table just says, "The second guest room on the left is yours." His sisters and their boyfriends or husbands are in all the other rooms and Chris tiptoes back downstairs and whispers, "It's okay, I'll take the couch."

Lance says, "Don't be an idiot," and carries Chris' bag, too.

Chris changes while Lance is in the bathroom. He brought a long-sleeved t-shirt and pajama pants and his scars throb against the soft cotton, too many hours in too small a car with his knees pulled up like a bored little kid. Lance flips off the light, crawls in and fluffs his pillow once. "G'night," he says, rolling onto his side and away. Chris murmurs good night back.

Tomorrow they'll wake up and it will be Christmas Eve. There was some holiday party, nine, maybe ten years ago, all of them at Joey's house, or it could have been Justin's. There was too much eggnog and Lance had kissed Chris under some poor excuse for mistletoe they'd swiped from an MTV promo. Lance'd kissed Joey right before Chris and JC right after and then Lance and Justin made out all night. Chris honestly can't remember now if the kiss was any good or if he really wanted it to go any further.

And anyway it doesn't seem long after that when Lance was kissing Justin for real and the rest of them all started making plans for what a future without a group might look like. He can't remember how Lance kisses but he pulls the covers up around his shoulders and thinks to himself, don't be an idiot.

Chris sleeps tucked up in a little ball like a beetle. He always has. It's one of the few things he still blames his mom for. He'll never say that to her face and it's such a petty fucking thing to blame on a parent when plenty of kids have real reasons to be fucked up for life. But there's how he gets nervous when there's less than twenty bucks in his wallet and the way his first instinct is to lie when asked if he's already paid for something, and there's sleeping in a compact tiny package so everyone can fit. Otherwise they're just fine and the older he gets, the closer in age he and his mom seem.

Since the surgery he usually wakes up with one leg extended out of his little pod, because it doesn't matter how he goes to bed, he'll wake up how his body's trained. It came in handy for the bus, and when Justin's long feet would be poking out between the curtains and he'd get bumped every time someone walked by, Chris always silently apologized to his mom for being anything but grateful. In Chicago, he's got a king-sized bed to come home to every night, and no matter how sprawled he starts out, no matter if he's got someone else in there with him, he wakes up the same.

It's been a while since there's been someone with him, though, and when the alarm goes off in the morning he's not sure which is more confusing, the warm heat of a hand pressed against the middle of his back or that his alarm now sounds a hell of a lot like Lance's cell phone. Chris sits up straight and pokes Lance, who's kind of curled into a half-moon around Chris' body.

Lance doesn't stir, and Chris pokes him again, whispers hoarsely. "Lance. Wake up. Wake up."

Lance grumbles low in his throat.

"Phone," Chris whispers, tugging on the sleeve of Lance's t-shirt. "Your phone is gonna wake up my whole goddamned family, Lance."

"Why'nt you answer it then," Lance mumbles, rolling up and away and toward his bags.

"I'm not gonna answer your phone," Chris says. "What if it was, it's not, it's not myphone."

Lance sits down on the carpet next to his jacket and pulls the phone out of the pocket. He looks at the display and sighs heavily and Chris is really glad he didn't answer the phone, because, of course, of course. Justin is calling and Lance will go back and Chris has known this all along but it doesn't mean he wants to be the goddamned receptionist again. Chris pushes back the covers and stands next to the bed. "I'm just gonna --"

"It's my mom," Lance says, wearily, hand covering a yawn. He's wearing pale blue boxers and a white v-neck undershirt and Chris' toes are cold but Lance is always hot.

"Oh. Oh. I'm, still, I'm just gonna --" Chris starts toward the bathroom door and Lance grabs his ankle.

"I haven't," Lance says. "She doesn't know. 'Bout Justin, I didn't tell her." He sighs again. "Yet. I didn't tell her yet."

Chris looks down at where Lance has fingers looped around their tattoo. He crouches down so they're at eye-level. The phone rings again and Lance muffles it with his other hand, pressing it into the carpet. "Do you want me to stay?" Chris asks.

Lance looks like he catches himself wanting to say yes and so he shakes his head emphatically no. Chris stands back up and his left knee pops loudly. Lance lets go of his leg and Chris goes in to take a shower.

When he comes out, Lance has tucked in the covers but is gone. Chris finds him downstairs making pancakes with his mom and Emily, laughing and having a good old time. Chris feels old and grumpy, like Papa Bear. "Someone's been sitting in mychair," he says to Lance, catching his mom in a hug from behind. She turns in her arms and kisses him on the cheek, holding floured hands up and away from his shirt.

"This boy almost scared me to death, Christopher," she says, swatting at Lance's mixing bowl. "You think just cause you bought this house you don't have to give your old lady a heads up on how many people to expect for Christmas dinner?"

"Sorry," he says, leaning elbows on the counter. "Me and Lance failed Mama's Boy 101, didn't you get the note?"

"Bullshit," she says, and Lance just keeps pouring batter into dollar-sized drops on the griddle. "But you know it's okay anyway." She runs her hands under the sink, touches a finger to Chris' cheek. She smiles and Chris still doesn't take those for granted. "It's nice to see you, honey. You look good."

It's kind of like the old days again, because after the first few years when they were stranded in Europe together none of them had been able to live through a winter break without eventually making their way to somebody else's house. They usually went to Joey's or Lance's though, something in those happy, intact nuclear families serving as the bridge between what their lives looked like and what they'd all grown up seeing in the movies. This is kind of nice, having Lance there, because it's not like a new girlfriend or someone you gotta keep an eye on all the time to make sure the family's not eating her alive. Lance already knows everyone and he's telling movie star stories.

The house is full up all day with his sisters and their families and by noon Chris is ready to take a nap or run away, so it's just like old times. He sits in the big living room with Hemingway's short stories, back to those because The Old Man and the Sea was just a little vacation and not his favorite anyway. He opens the book for the first time in weeks and it falls to another story about Africa. A lot of these are about Africa and Chris spent twenty-four of his eighty days in Africa so he reads them closely, maybe trying to get something back.

This one is set in Kilimanjaro. He didn't go to Kilimanjaro because he was sick of standing at the base of mountains he knew he'd never climb, but he'd gone on safari in the Serengeti. Hemingway's got some writer dying of gangrene while his girlfriend shoots game and Chris reads most of the paragraphs twice to make sure he doesn't miss anything. The writer is rotting away and delirious and Chris remembers how for weeks the skin on his inner thigh looked like a raisin.

"What's that?" Lance says, perching on the broad ottoman next to Chris' feet. Chris holds up the spine so Lance can see and Lance looks thoughtful, like maybe he doesn't believe Chris is really doing this for fun, and not just to avoid work.

Chris goes back to his reading, and when Lance jabs his calf and says, "tell me a story," poking again and again, Chris sighs like it's a bother but then reads aloud, voice measured as if it's for TV: "It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones."

"Oh," Lance says. "That's."

"Yeah," Chris says.

Lance stands up and settles into the chair next to Chris, stretches an arm out to touch Chris' armrest. "Read it again," he says, closing his eyes. Chris gets through three stories about bullfighters and game hunters and soldiers too shell-shocked to take out their fathers' cars and meet local girls before his sisters come back from the mall.

Nobody mentions Justin at dinner and Chris wonders if his mom said something, if Lance said something to his mom. He wonders what Lance's mom said on the phone that morning and when most everyone's packed into the living room watching It's a Wonderful Life, he asks.

Lance folds his hand on his chest and leans against the fridge. "Justin called her, so."

There's a burst of laughter and clapping from the other room and Chris looks back over his shoulder. He edges toward Lance and pushes up with his arms to sit on the counter so they're facing each other and he can get off his feet for a few minutes. "So..." Chris asks.

"So he told her it was just a fight and I told her he was full of it. And then she said I was overreacting and I hung up."

"Oh, Lance. You can't --"

"I called her back," Lance says. He rubs his own arms like he's cold and Chris shivers. This kitchen's always been drafty.

Chris waits. He doesn't know what to ask if Lance is so freaked out he's hanging up on his mom.

Lance says, "I -- it -- it really." He clenches his jaw and goes on in a rush. "I told her I walked in on him fucking some guy in our bed and. I didn't say 'fucking.' But."

"God," Chris says.

"No," Lance says. "The thing is. I -- I didn't care. It had been, really, I mean, it had been like a year since we'd been doing much more than just sharing space. So. And it's not like we both..."

"God," Chris says again.

"It was just the first time he did it like that, right there, where he knew I'd." Lance looks up and his eyes are bright but not quite mad, and Chris thinks, that's something. If he's not hurt or pissed about it, that's something. Chris isn't sure what, precisely, but he doesn't spend too much time wondering, because Lance says, "And, you know, I'd never really told her any of that and he's been this, like, I mean, she loves him and has forever, so that didn't really go all that well either but at least I didn't hang up. But I don't. I don't think she really gets it. All she really said at the end was that I had to tell her these things myself, and so I said I was here with you and she went to put in the turkey. She says hi, also."

"Hi," Chris says, weakly, and Lance is kicking his shoe into Chris' mom's polished tile floor and Chris thinks if he jumps off the counter now like he wants, he'll feel his kneecaps reverberating in his throat. Lance sniffs and Chris says, "Come here." Lance kind of shuffles over the few feet between them and when he's standing close enough, Chris puts his arms around Lance and hugs him long and tight. Lance stands there in the V of Chris' legs with his shoulders slumped and Chris says, "You know she loves you, come on."

Lance nods and his hair is in Chris' mouth. Chris tilts his neck and holds Lance like it can speed time, like if he doesn't let go they'll wake up in a year and all the ways this hurts will be kind of dull and faded.

Lance breathes out long and shuddering and then pulls back. "This isn't, I mean. This isn't really about him, you know. Right? It's not, really I left because I didn't care and maybe he wanted me to, maybe that's why he did it, but I didn't. I just didn't care about any of it anymore."

"Okay," Chris says, his hand still on Lance's bicep, like he might break the spell or something if he lets go for real. This is like Lance a million years ago when he would just walk in and sit down and say he was homesick again, when he trusted the four of them with the secret he was sure even a mama's boy's mom couldn't handle.

"I'm sorry," Lance says, waving a hand around and then letting it fall on the counter next to Chris' leg. "I'm fucking maudlin and it's Christmas and --"

Chris leans in and whispers, "You know I've always hated Christmas," and Lance smiles a teensy, weensy bit. "It's so full of expectations you can never meet. Just don't tell my mom, cause she still likes to make a big deal of it and everything. Cause of, you know, when she couldn't."

The lines around Lance's mouth crinkle and he kind of laughs into Chris' neck, hugs him again gratefully. "Somebody's got to tell her these things, you know."

"We could have, like, a trade association," Chris says.

"The mama's boy exchange."

"It's like a club."

"You can be the vice-president," Lance says, and Chris shoves him back, and then Chris' mom walks in talking about hot toddys and Lance is flushed and says, "Ask your son, the bartender. I'm out of the business."

They go up to bed before midnight because they know all the little ones will be running through the halls screaming about new toys as soon as it's light out. Chris is almost asleep when Lance says, quietly, "Thank you, for this. For bringing me."

"Yeah," Chris says, his back to Lance. "And. I swear, I thought I'd told her."

"I know," Lance says.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different, but he doesn't have all the answers. He fits into your life._

The day after Christmas, Chris decides they should go to Florida and visit Joey. "All that's waiting back in Chicago is more fucking gray skies," he says, and Lance smiles and lets Taylor's baby boy draw bright blue swirls up his arm with a marker. Really it's about momentum, Chris thinks. He thinks they need to keep moving while they can and then he thinks he's being an idiot again.

They take I-95 down the coast and spend one night in Charleston. The suite is spacious and on the top floor of the hotel. Lance decides both of those things are necessary and has his Amex out before Chris can say anything. When Chris wakes up at six in the morning to take a leak he thinks for a minute they've got to rest up for a show or something. Lance's door to the living room is open and Chris watches the early morning news on mute, reading misspelled closed captioning.

It's after dark by the time they roll into town, because it may still be warm this time of year in Florida but they can't really avoid the axis of the earth entirely. Chris called Joey before they left and this time he knows he said that Lance was coming, too, because Joey asked him three times if he'd heard wrong. Chris finally said, "Look, they broke up, ask him yourself," and hung up. The moon is hanging over the skyline like a fucking establishing shot on MTV and suddenly it's all wrong, it's not where they should be at all.

They should have gone to Tanzania if they were looking to get away for a while. They could have gone and laid in the sun on a boat in the Aegean Sea with JC and it wouldn't have been as cloaked in memory. Decades, centuries, it seems, of driving around Orlando with the windows open, talking endless bullshit about how famous they'd be, Chris and whoever was in on the plan that week, MGD in a styrofoam cooler on the floor of the backseat and Led Zep on the radio. Except it wasn't bullshit, and it wasn't anything like what he'd thought. It wasn't even with who he'd thought it would be and still he wouldn't change a goddamned minute of those centuries, not even if they'd give him back his knees and all the years after the best years of his life. Not even if he got it all back intact. Not even then.

Lance has one hand out the window as they glide through town. They're early and Chris knows how to get to Joey's but Lance doesn't seem to be in any hurry. Chris guesses if he hadn't talked to his once-best friend in so long he might not rush it, either. Chris had spent a month in LA after Justin went back trying to figure out how to have that first awkward conversation, until he decided he'd rather drive hot nails into his kneecaps than watch Justin curl up to Lance like those three months had just been in Chris' head.

"When's the last time you were here?" he asks Lance.

Lance turns down the radio, because "you don't drive down the street in Orlando with a CD on, for chrissakes," Chris had said.

"Business," Lance shrugs. "I don't know. The last couple times I don't even think I spent the night, just went up to New York or back to LA the same night. We went out to Johnny's a couple years back when he was. Recovering."

"They think they got it all this time," Chris says, and Lance nods. His dark hair is feathered back from the breeze and for the first time Chris misses the incessant blondification those two insisted on long after Lou could dictate their hair color.

Chris has to tell Lance how to get to Joey's house and that's kind of a weird moment for both of them. But then they're there and the guard waves them in. Joey's standing in the driveway when they pull up and he whistles at the Avanti and says, "Jesus, Lance. Bout time you got a real car." Lance blushes like he always did when Joey said something manly and sweet all at once and Chris is slow getting out, ties his shoe and takes off his jacket. When he looks up Lance and Joey are still hugging. Joey claps twice on Lance's back and finally lets go. "You guys hungry?" Joey asks.

Joey's kitchen is huge, for the cameras, he says, from before he got the new show and the bigger set. "I hated having to keep the girls away so they didn't lick one of the cords or something," Joey says. Everywhere there are pictures of his girls, the girls and their moms, almost in pairs like he counted to be sure there were the same number of each. Chris thinks he probably did. "There's gotta be a way to make this work," Joey said after Melissa, the younger girl's mom, told him she was pregnant. Audrey is almost five now.

Five years and a stupid fight because Melissa wanted her cousin to be the godfather and Lance and Joey are best friends again in a matter of seconds. All these years of missing Justin and Chris gets lost in those naked moments, those minutes when he watched Justin sleeping in the big hotel room, skin smooth and tight across his ribs. Wrinkling his nose at the suggestion that they get out of LA for a while, just the two of them, grabbing Chris and tugging on his dick and saying, "What could you do to me there that you can't do here?" Three months in a Beverly Hills hotel and Chris has spent so long obsessing over a handful of moments that he's practically rewritten the time before that, the decade they spent attached at the hip and content to be fucking anyone but each other.

"What we oughta do is have a party," Chris announces. "Big motherfucking blow-out, you know? Invite anyone who's still around, put on some old albums. It'll be like a high school reunion. We can see who got married and who got fat. I heard Nick and his wife split up. Again. So, that could be amusing right there."

Lance stiffens and Joey puts his hands around his big, soft belly. "Yeah, or not," Joey says, looking at Lance and then back to Chris with a glare. Chris thinks Justin would've laughed.

"He's just wired from being cooped up in the car for so long," Lance says quietly.

Chris crosses his arms. "I'm not a five-year-old, Lance. Also I'm standing right here."

Joey shrugs and says, "It used to work." It's too warm in Joey's house and everybody's tense and they used to be so goddamned good at this they never even noticed it was such work.

Lance says, "I don't think I'm really ready for the engraved divorce announcement, okay?" He looks at Chris and Chris nods, looks down. Lance used to be his friend, too. After they were supposed to all try going their separate ways, before the first split, Lance would meet Justin and Chris at the golf course and they'd all have dinner. Dinner and same old same old and it's not like Chris was waiting for things to fall apart. He was just there the first time Lance wanted too much, wanted Justin to have grown out of needing a girl at every premiere. Back when Justin still said no to Lance and he showed up at Chris' hotel with a hard, fierce smile and pushed Chris against the wall. Chris stopped him once, just once, and Justin said, "you've always wanted this." Chris didn't actually think that was true but he couldn't really deny that he did want it then. Three months and Lance called and Justin came, came out and told anyone who'd listen that Lance was the love of his life.

"Okay," Joey says. "Seriously? There is some bad-ass salmon with artichoke marinade out on the grill if you all are hungry."

"Fancy pants," Chris says, and when Lance looks up Chris winks at him because all these years and Lance should know that means he's sorry.

"You think I can just make spaghetti and meatballs on national TV every night and no one would call in a complaint?" Joey asks.

"So pretty much you go to culinary school for, what, like, a week?" Chris says. "And then we're just your guinea pigs for life."

Joey throws an arm around Chris' shoulders. "Come see what I did with the yard since the last time you were here, dude."

Dinner and they sit through a half hour of videos of the girls before Lance kindly points out that they'll see them in the flesh the next day. Chris comes back from the bathroom and Joey's got a hand up on Lance's neck, elbow on the back of the couch. Joey says, "Pete is a crappy godfather, man. I, I shouldn't've."

"Nah, it's okay," Lance says. "Audrey's got two folks, you can't win all of 'em. And anyway who's the one who hasn't done more than send birthday and Christmas gifts in five years to the goddaughter he does have?"

"She's gonna be so psyched to see you. Really."

"Yeah," Lance says, and Joey squeezes his neck. Chris waits a beat and plops on the sofa beside Lance, slaps Lance's knee. "Uncle Laaaaaaaance," he squeaks.

Lance shakes his head. "You're just jealous."

"Bet your ass," Chris says.

The next morning Lance says he's going to Johnny's and "this one I kinda gotta do on my own, guys, but thanks." Chris doesn't really know what that's about and just shrugs when Joey asks him.

"Lotta stuff Lance doesn't say to me," Chris admits. "I try not to let a bad breakup get in the way of riding someone's ass, though, so it's working out okay."

"He seems..." Joey stops. "He seems kind of okay about that part."

Chris bites his lip. "You talked to him about it?"

"Not really. A little. He said it'd been over for a while."

"Yeah." Chris debates telling Joey the rest. Or, well, the rest that he knows, anyway. He swears they used to have some kind of game plan for this shit, some rules for what was secret-secret and what was okay for the guys but no one else, and what was okay to turn into a tall tale to be told over and over on talk shows. There used to be rules, he's sure, rules and regulations and codes and covenants like zoning laws that mapped out their lives.

Now he just picks at his nails and hopes Joey will flat-out ask him, because they never lie. Not to each other, not even by omission, not even when they never quite told the truth to the rest of the world. "You know the rest of it?" Joey finally asks, so Chris tells him what Lance had said to Diane.

Joey whistles out low between his teeth. "I guess he's just more together than he used to be," Joey says, "cause he doesn't seem too broken to me. And, Jesus, if anyone knows what he's going through." Joey looks at Chris and Chris looks back and for a second it's serious, it's almost profound, but then it degenerates into this crazy staring contest. He and Joey don't really do profound except by accident.

Chris counts in his head and four minutes and thirty-eight seconds later Joey blinks and throws up his hands in frustration. "When the fuck did you get so fucking patient, man?"

"Six months flat on my back, buddy boy. It was either that or write Profiles in Courage, but, you know."

There's a hand on Chris' shoulder from behind and when he tilts his head back, Lance is smiling down at him, furrowed brow loosening like undone laces. "But you, old man," Lance says, "are no Jack Kennedy."

They go out to dinner, a nice place where Joey knows the chef and they get things not yet on the menu. More bullshitting and Chris sleeps lightly and frantically, like his body is desperately trying to milk relief from the off-time but can't ever slow down enough to appreciate it. He opens his eyes for the fiftieth time and Lance is at the foot of the bed, even after he blinks twice to make sure.

"What time is it?" Chris asks, because it's what he always says when there's no good way to ask what someone's doing in your room in the middle of the night. It's still dark. It's still the middle of the night, and there's Lance in his room.

"Five thirty," Lance says. He's wearing white boxers and a green t-shirt that says VIP on it in big movie marquee type.

Chris pushes himself up against the headboard and fumbles on the nightstand for his glasses. Once they're on he can see that Lance is stretching out a hand and in the hand is a cordless phone. His brain is still stringing pieces of information together in a fucked-up sequence and not really trying to make sense of the order or relevance. "What," he says.

"Somebody needs to buy the boy a watch set to one of our time zones," Lance says, putting the phone in Chris' hands. "It's C, man. Say something."

Chris brings the phone to his mouth. "What the fuck, dude, it's like the crack of dawn here." He licks his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut. Lance starts to walk away and Chris reaches out and snags Lance's wrist in a loop, shaking his head. "Stay," he mouths, and Lance stares at him. Chris rolls his eyes and points at the phone, covering the mouthpiece. "I can't be held accountable for shit I say when I'm not awake yet, okay?" Lance sits on the edge of the bed.

"Were you sleeping?" JC asks. Chris can't really remember the first time he saw one of those pin drop commercials but he knows it didn't used to be quite so true. There's no crackle at all.

"Yes, JC, I was sleeping," he says.

"What were you dreaming about?" JC asks, and Chris laughs and kind of leans his forehead into Lance's back. Lance turns his head and smiles sleepily.

"You, baby," Chris says. "I always dream about you, you know that." JC chuckles from the next room or five thousand miles away and Chris misses him like a fever. "Please tell me you're lying on some yacht naked right now or I might have to hang up in disappointment." Chris has a hand on Lance's back and he can feel the seismic shift of Lance's laugh before he hears it.

"Is Lance okay?"

Chris puts his hand on Lance's shoulder and squeezes. "Lance is right here," he says. "You talk to Joe yet or does he get to sleep in?"

"I'm talking to you. I can't tell, without. Without seeing him. Because, I mean. Man, it's, eight years, it's forever and they were the ones who were supposed to be, you know. Happy."

"You're happy," Chris says. He watches his hands draw little circles on Lance's warm back and wonders how many mornings they all spent like this, fits and starts of getting ready and cleaning up messes from the night before, wrapped up in each other for comfort or strength or distraction. He'd told Dani to live the life she deserved with JC's hair slipping between his fingers, sitting in the lounge on the bus between one city and another where he'd meet a thousand girls who couldn't light up a closet in comparison to the kind of woman she was. He'd hung up the phone and JC'd leaned his cheek into Chris' thigh and they'd sat like that until the next truck stop. He can't remember if he cried.

JC is quiet and finally Chris says it again, as a question. He doesn't want to know but he kind of has to. They don't lie to each other, not even by omission.

"I'm starting to dream in Italian," JC says. "And then I wake up and I forget how to think in English for hours at a time. It's wild."

Chris sighs. "Jayce." He rubs a hand up and down Lance's arm from behind and says, "He's okay, really." He would really, really kill for a strong cup of coffee and a real night's sleep and the chance to run his hands through JC's hair for hours on end.

"I just," JC says. "I knew that wouldn't be my kind of happy, what they had, there in the middle of it. I had to go so far away, and you're all on the wrong side of the day, and I wanted to think it could work there. For them. Like that."

Lance leans back against Chris' chest and pulls Chris' arm tight across his own body. "Yeah," Chris says. "I know you did, honey. I know."

Someone yells in Italian on the other end and JC laughs like the hook to a pop song, looping in Chris' head and he knows it will be days before he forgets the sound. "Okay, andiamo!" JC yells back. "Listen, we're, we have to go. Tell Joey to call me when the girls are there. Audrey can count to a hundred in Italian now, you should hear it, it's amazing. And, Chris, Chris -- make sure he stays okay, for me, right?"

Chris rests his chin on Lance's shoulder. "Not just for you," he says, and JC hangs up without saying goodbye. Chris drops the phone to the bed and there's Lance all in his arms, warm and smelling minty fresh and it's been a long time. It's been years and Chris had almost forgotten. JC's laugh is still in his head and coffee would be good for connecting words to meaning and not just in order, and he says into Lance's neck, "When did you brush your teeth?"

Lance's shoulders lift and fall. "He talked about this painting he sold for, like, ten minutes. He wasn't really letting me get a word in until he asked to talk to Justin. Also Joey used a lot of garlic on that steak."

"He thinks you're not really okay," Chris says, and Lance's hand slides over his own.

"Did y'all take a vote or something?" Lance says.

Chris pushes his knuckles up so they're kind of holding hands. "Joey thinks either you're doing the acting job of your life or you're okay."

"So what's it gonna be, tiebreaker?" Lance's voice is so low and it's really been so long and through the heavy curtains it's still pitch-black dark outside.

"I think..." Chris doesn't really think yet, not this early. Lance rubs his thumb against Chris' palm, back and forth like he's pacing. "I think you've always gotten what you wanted, and you want to be okay, and so you will be."

Lance is quiet a long while and Chris rests his cheek against Lance's back, closing his eyes and breathing steadily. "Are you even awake yet?" Lance asks, pinching skin on the back of Chris' hand, and Chris untangles himself and flops back on the bed. Lance stands up.

"Not really," Chris says. He's cold without Lance there and he rolls around until blankets cover most of his body.

Lance plucks the glasses from Chris' face, takes the phone and walks to the door. "Go back to sleep," he says.

Chris crashes until noon and when he wakes up this time it's because Joey spits water in his face. "What the --" Chris says, and stops because both the girls are peeking around Joey's back. He wipes his face with his sleeve. "This what you call setting a good example, dad?"

"You want them to learn it wrong?" Joey asks, and Brianna and Audrey giggle, come out from behind Joey. Joey looks down at them. "Don't listen to him, anyway. That's how he used to wake up Uncle JC. Where'd you think I learned it from?"

Chris sits up and holds out his arms and Audrey jumps into them like she's got springs in her ankles. She sits in his lap with her back against his chest, still so little. "Your daddy's a big fat liar," he grumbles into her hair, tickling her stomach.

"Uncle Justin," Brianna says, leaping on the foot of the bed. "That's who I learned it from."

Joey catches her as she keels backwards. "You remember that?" He tries but Chris can feel the way Joey's register drops a little and his words get careful.

Audrey tilts her head back and stares up Chris' nose until he leans down and blows a raspberry on her cheek. Brianna looks from the two of them to Joey and back again but doesn't say anything else. Chris remembers being eleven because it was the last birthday he had before he started working. Double digits and you think you know how the world works, and maybe she's right. She's a pretty smart kid. She wriggles free from Joey's arms and jumps up and down until Chris hands Audrey over to Joey, throws Brianna over his shoulder and twirls her around the bedroom. Audrey claps her hands and says, "me next, me next!"

Chris plays till he's dizzy and his knees hurt too much. He won't ever have kids, he knows it, like he knows dogs aren't the same thing and still he calls Graciela every day to make sure they're okay, that Jenny's kennel cough isn't acting up, or that Sophie's ankle hasn't gotten infected again from where this stray cat clawed it to the bone.

Joey puts away a six-pack without burping and makes pizza from scratch like he's walking a yellow line with his finger to his nose. Lance eats three pieces and yawns loudly. "Those girls of yours..." he says, and Chris remembers when they said _Joey's girls_ with resignation or strained amusement. Now Lance says it and it's the happiest he's sounded since he showed up in Chicago.

They sit out in the backyard with sun on their shoulders. Lance slides next to Chris when he comes back with more Coke and puts his arm up on the back of the chair. Chris flips Lance's sunglasses down off his head so he'll stop squinting.

"You tired?" Lance asks, and Chris shakes his head but then accidentally yawns. They look at each other and laugh, and Lance squeezes Chris' thigh under the table. He leaves his hand there and Chris leans in a little, pops open both of their sodas one-handed.

"How long's it been, anyway," he asks, tapping the aluminum can.

They're sitting close enough that Chris can see Lance's eyelashes flutter downward beneath his amber glasses. "Two years," Lance says. "Two years next month."

Chris puts his hand down on top of Lance's, pats it gently. "Good for you," Chris says, and when Joey sits down across from them it's with a flickering frown. Chris drinks his Coke and finishes his chips and then the girls talk Lance into taking them to a movie.

Joey shrugs and says in a pretend-hurt voice, "That's fine, we don't want you here anyway!" but there's so much love there that the girls don't waste a second taking any of it seriously. Chris watches them go, one on either side of Lance, holding his hands. They take Joey's big SUV because it has airbags and better seat belts and everybody waves as Lance pulls out of the driveway.

"This is good," Chris says, as they walk back to the house. "He really, this is good for him."

"Yeah," Joey says, and it's like clouds pass over as soon as his girls are gone. In the kitchen, Joey pulls vegetables from the bins and washes them in the big stainless steel sink. He won't let Chris help, says it's faster for him to do it himself the way he wants.

Chris watches the tension in Joey's wrists as he chops, the way he wipes his hands on his apron in a hard, fast motion. "Everything cool?" he asks.

Joey doesn't stop until the yellow squash is a row of thin discs on the cutting board. There are little grooves in the wooden block and red juice from the peppers fills them like rivers. "Fine," Joey says, laying the knife down. "You want a beer?"

Chris stares at the island, traces the grout between tiles with his fingertips. "Nope," he says.

Joey opens the fridge and talks into it. "He's not here, man, you can stop the sympathy sobriety or whatever the hell." He turns around and puts a Newcastle in front of Chris.

Chris shakes his head, steals a slice of squash and chews slowly. "No, seriously, it really doesn't -- I quit a long time ago. Mostly, I mean. During my trip." He pushes the bottle back towards Joey. "So."

"Why?" Joey asks, kind of harshly. He takes a long pull of Chris' beer. "I mean. You never said anything."

Chris shrugs. "I was sick of having shit to apologize for in the morning. Or not remembering at all. And I'm not a fucking frat boy, it was about time I stopped acting like one."

"There's such a thing as moderation, my man." Joey halves and then quarters tomatoes. Chris hopes JC's eating this well in Italy. "I mean, none of us hits it like we used to, doesn't mean you gotta sip on seltzer for the rest of your life."

"I fell off the wagon a couple times," Chris says. "Didn't kill me. But it wasn't that great, neither."

"So it's not..." Joey drops the tomatoes in a pot full of hot water and goes to work on the onions. "It's not about Lance," he says, and Chris takes a step back from the island but only because the smell of the onions is really strong and making his eyes water.

"Why would you say that," Chris says flatly. Fucking onions. This is why he doesn't cook.

"Why do you think he went to you?" Joey pauses and blinks his eyes widely but just lets tears run down his cheeks, doesn't try to wipe them away. "He could've gone home. He could've come here, for chrissakes."

"What are you talking about?" Chris asks. He rubs his own eyes.

"What are you doing?" Joey asks.

Chris clenches his jaw and sings Depeche Mode lyrics in his head. It's how he got through the first week after the surgery, singing whole albums in a row to himself so he wouldn't think about how it felt like he had fucking chainsaws for joints.

Joey says, "I mean, you don't think. You don't think it means anything, right?" He puts down the knife again and uses the hand towel to wipe his face. "He's just, he's just lonely."

"Oh, fuck you, Joe, seriously. What the hell?"

"I just thought it was a little late in the game for us to start lying to each other." Joey sniffs away another fake tear and Chris kicks at the cabinets.

He holds onto the edge of the counter and leans back a little, talks to the floor. "Right, and the first person you called when you found out you'd knocked up Kelly was your mom," Chris says. "That wasn't you on my doorstep at fucking three in the morning bawling your eyes out, I'd forgotten. And, sure, he could have come here except you guys have been too goddamned stubborn for the past five years to admit you were just scared you were growing apart."

"Fuck you," Joey says.

"I thought we were gonna tell the truth here," Chris snarls. Fucking Joey and his life just the way he wants it. He makes his own rules, never fucking sees that it's not that easy for everyone.

Joey leans back against the stove, crosses his arms. "Fine," Joey says. "You first."

Joey sounds weary and kind of old and when Chris looks up he just sees this best friend of his who's got a beer belly and two kids with two different women and none of them's getting any younger. It all goes through Chris like dry afternoon wind on an African plain and he sags against the counter, head dropped into his hands for an moment.

"Fuck," Chris sighs. Joey sighs back. Chris rubs his eyes again and says, "Yeah, he's gonna go back, I know. I know."

"That's not --"

"No, it's, I know. I don't know why he came to me, he's never said. And I don't know what Justin's doing right now, even though I really want to, I want to just call him up and find out how he is, what his life is like." Chris peels at the label on Joey's beer and hangs his head. "I don't know, maybe it's easier just hearing pieces of one side of the story. I don't think I'm very good at figuring out the truth for myself anymore."

"Yeah you are," Joey says. "And you. You're a good friend. He came to you and you didn't ask why and after everything, everything you two, you three've been through. I don't think I could've done that."

"We promised," Chris says softly. "We all did."

"Even so," Joey says. "Even so you're a great friend."

Chris shrugs, straightens up. "So're you," he says. The tomatoes are bubbling and spitting and Chris points at the pot. "We're back to spaghetti?"

Chris isn't sure what to say to Lance when they're all five around the big dining room table, so he shows Audrey how to draw cartoon characters with the noodles on her plate. He only even hears his phone ring because Lance slugs his shoulder and tells him it's a stupid song to have on a phone. "Don't make fun of the three blind mice," he tosses back over his shoulder as he runs up the stairs. "You're only a few years from needing bifocals yourself, pretty boy."

He sits gingerly on the bed and it's Claude. It's Claude and Chris says, "So a guy walks into a bar."

Claude says, "And he's from the liquor authority and it turns out he's not so cool with you having twelve-year-olds play at holiday parties."

"He's seventeen," Chris says, but neither Claude nor the liquor authority apparently finds that very funny. Claude says he's got it handled but if he called Chris knows it must be serious. He tells Claude he'll come back the next day and Audrey and Brianna pretend to throw temper tantrums until he tosses them in the pool and jumps in after.

Lance is standing there with towels when they climb out but doesn't meet his eye, just bends down and cuddles the girls in warm terrycloth. Joey nods and says, "Business is business, you all understand, right?" He looks at Lance when he says it and Lance offers to drive Chris to the airport at seven in the morning.

Lance knocks on his bedroom door at quarter till and Chris says come in. He's tugging up the bedspread and Lance picks up Chris' bags and goes down to the car without speaking.

The Avanti coughs a little and it's chilly, late December and the stink of smudgepots in the air. Chris plays with the cuff of his jeans and says, finally, "You should stay a while." Lance looks over. "You. You seem happy here, you know. And the girls --"

"Yeah," Lance says, clipped. "Making up for lost time and all that."

There's mist hanging above the retention ponds on the side of the road, steam like sweat on smooth skin in the air and Chris sighs and stares out the side window. "I just meant. Whatever."

He's leaving and it's what a good friend would have done a while ago, he thinks. He guesses not everyone gets that or likes it but that's what friends are for. JC left because he didn't know how to be happy like the rest of them, still in the middle of things, and it sucks but it's what he needed to do and the days when Chris thinks the truth is JC is a coward are pretty much in the past. Lance is going to go back and no sense in anyone getting attached to the best years of their lives again anyway. He really hasn't slept well all week and he smothers a yawn against his fist as they slide in front of the departure terminal.

"You can maybe sleep on the plane," Lance says, softer, and Chris shrugs. It's unlikely. Lance gets out of the car first and sets the bags at Chris' feet. He pulls Chris into a hug and Chris closes his eyes for a second and then steps back. Lance leans against the silver car and crosses his arms. Chris just waves and walks away. That's what friends are for. Fucking Dionne Warwick is stuck in his head as the plane takes off and it's still there when he lands at O'Hare.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different, but he doesn't have all the answers. He fits into your life, except not quite in a way that makes sense to you or the people around you._

Chris packed his coat like the idiot he apparently is these days and there's a line for the fucking cabs and by the time he gets home it's dark and dreary. Of course his keys are in his coat pocket and so he stands on his front steps in the biting wind in a pool of clothes and decoupaged pencil holders like a little kid who's gotten locked out. The dogs tackle him the minute he's inside and it takes so long to get them calmed down that the local cops show up because he never keyed in the code.

Even with the heat cranked up he can't get warm. There's a front moving in, says the asshole who does the weather on WGN. He looks like Lou if Lou was still the same age as when Chris first met him and Chris thinks that might be hell, a world where Lou has a portrait in the attic but even Justin gets old and ugly. Chris piles blankets on his bed and the dogs clamber up but his teeth still chatter. He wakes up to a charley horse in his left thigh and a headache and his nose feels like it's frozen.

He works out for the first time in forever and his muscles scream. Graciela talks a mile a minute and Chris picks up maybe half of what she's saying because he feels so out of practice with it all, with the language and his house and his life just like it was six weeks ago. Six weeks and before that six years and Chris always knew he'd go back but it sucks having no one to talk to over breakfast.

He spends all day downtown making friends and kissing ass and paying fines and getting his hand slapped. He calls Claude from the car and says he's going home, he'll come in tomorrow for the big New Year's party, he's got to get a decent night's sleep. Lake Shore Drive feels too close to the water, like if he looks away from the white line for a minute he'll be over the beach and in the gray waves. They passed winter solstice so the days should be getting longer but it's not like you can tell yet, and the lights have come on automatically along Chris' long driveway.

For no reason Chris can remember the garage door opener is at the bottom of the glove box and when he's finally got it open there are miles of empty concrete staring him in the face, mocking him. That huge fucking garage and the only thing in it is his bike and even the bike looks lonely. He's forty years old and this is life and it's not a fucking metaphor or anything that he's the only one who lives someplace cold.

The dogs are glad to see him but not like the night before and Chris lights a fire and digs Hemingway out of his suitcase. There's plenty of liquor in the house because he owns a bar and he has to entertain and it's not like his hands shake at the smell of the stuff or anything. Plus there's an old bottle of Maker's Mark in the back of one of the cabinets. He fills the tumbler halfway and comes back for the bottle when he's halfway to the living room.

Back to Tanzania and Kilimanjaro because it's not like he can really read aloud and absorb the point of a story at the same time. It's like reading a fucking teleprompter, your eyes just skim over the type and you make an ass of yourself before you've even processed what you've said. The only thing that matters is how the words sound, not what they mean. The fire crackles and spits and Chris swallows the liquor in one quick toss and it burns, it fucking hurts going down like maybe he can't breathe. He coughs and Maxim wanders back from the kitchen, long nails clacking on the floor. The dog curls on the rug in front of Chris' big leather chair and he rubs a hand through the scruff on Maxim's neck.

He whispers the words to himself, slowly, picking at the meaning like a cut on the roof of his mouth. "What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it." A log burns hot and red and breaks in two, falling with a crash. Maxim puts his head up at the sound and then tucks his chin back into his paws. The type starts to swim before Chris' eyes but he forges ahead. "However you make your living is where your talent lies."

Hemingway is too fucking dour for a night like this, Chris decides. He's read the goddamned paragraph three times and each time it just makes him feel worse so he shoves the book under the couch and wanders into the music room. It's totally dark outside and it was his fucking bright idea not to have curtains on this side of the house, the side facing out towards the water. It's not amusing. It's fucking creepy. He digs through a drawer of albums and picks the first loud, nasty thing he can find. When the guy from The Cramps yells "let's get fuuuuuucked up," Chris raises the bottle of bourbon and yells "fuck yeah" and downs as much as he can in one gulp.

He opens his eyes and Jenny and Sophie are both licking his face and there's so much fucking sun it's like he's on Mars or Mercury or one of those godforsaken planets that doesn't even have night or seasons or weather, just a lot of swirling clouds. Graciela is standing over him, clucking like his goddamned grandmother. He smells burnt wood and alcohol and there's fuzz from the carpet in his mouth, which would be because he's lying face down on the floor in front of the couch. He groans and sits up. "Oh, señor," Graciela says, shaking her head. He waves her away and crawls up the stairs and onto the floor of his big shower.

He sleeps until five and when Maxim pads into the bedroom and whines plaintively, he solemnly swears to remember why he quit drinking in the first place. Maxim yawns and barks and Chris shakes his head at himself in the mirror.

It's New Year's Eve and the roads are already a mess and he doesn't make it to the bar until almost eight. The place is so full he has to push three guys just to get to the stairs. Claude's in his office and calls Chris "bossman" when he pokes his head in. "Everything's good to go," Claude says, "if you're not up for this."

Chris says, "What are you talking about?"

Claude frowns. "You just look, uh. You get run over or something on the way down?"

Chris looks down at his clean, neatly pressed blue suit and scrubs at his freshly-shaven face.

"Your eyes, man," Claude says. Claude's eyes are wide, flat almonds in a friendly face and Chris remembers his own wild glare in the rearview mirror as he backed out of the garage.

"I fell off the wagon," Chris says, running a hand through his hair. "On the motherfucking expressway, yeah, long way down. I'm fine. I'll be fine."

Claude shrugs, "whatever you say, bossman," and Chris goes to his own office and locks the door behind him. There are message slips and faxes and it's all in order and that's somehow relaxing. He goes away and he comes back and it's only been a little over a week and nothing really changes that quickly. Everything's run smoothly while he was gone, the bar was closed three days anyway for the holiday, and in between a letter from one distributor and a late Christmas card from a booking agency there's the week's fax from the clipping service.

When they broke up, when they said let's do this now while we can still look each other in the eye, they signed a million things that means really he gets twice weekly reminders of the best years of his life. He gets royalties checks, little ones, and bigger cuts of the marketing because after the atom bomb there will be styrofoam and fucking 'N Sync collectibles. And also Johnny got them some kind of clipping service in perpetuity, anything about the group or one of the five of them in the press and he gets a nice crisp clean fax.

Chris doesn't learn anything new most of the time, usually they're just music of the millennium retrospectives, but he saves the ones he's in for his mom because she still keeps a scrapbook, which would be humiliating if it wasn't so sweet. Mostly for a while it's just been Justin's on-again, off-again A-list actor status and Variety business clips about Lance's company swallowing smaller studios. He usually throws those away without reading them.

So there between the distributor and booking agency is a fax from some Orlando paper with a photo of him and Joey and Lance walking down the street, he guesses that night they went out to dinner because the girls aren't with them. "'N Sync Wants it Back?" it says. It says he and Lance were there for a couple weeks, which isn't true, but there's Lance coming out of Johnny's in a photo inset, which is true. Joey is "the working dad's Martha Stewart," JC's a "recluse in Italy" and Chris is "a small-time businessman," which smarts a little, especially next to Justin and Lance, "the darlings of Hollywood's powerful gay elite."

The article backtracks to the band getting together and breaking up, all in one sentence, and to Justin and Lance getting together and coming out, all in another sentence. And then there's "the couple's annual Blonde Ambition Bash, a New Year's Eve fete benefiting fashionable charities held for the last five years but notably missing from this year's social register." He turns the page and there are pictures from last year's party and Justin looks perfect and Lance looks bored and they'd both dyed their hair for the occasion.

There are drums thumping downstairs and Chris knows he doesn't need to be there at all, the party's in full swing without him but it's not like he has someplace else to be. He calls Joey and Brianna answers the phone with a chirpy "Ciao!".

"You see the thing?" Joey asks right away, and Chris says yeah. "I guess it's a good thing he got out of town, this place is gonna be fucking crawling with cameras again, I bet."

"People don't care," Chris says, and then he catches up and adds, "He left?"

"The fucking reporter from the Enquirer tried to give Brianna the third degree when she went for a bike ride yesterday, dude. Way uncool."

"Totally uncool," Chris says, and bites his lip so he doesn't ask again. His head throbs and he digs through the top drawer for painkillers, swallows one dry.

"I swear I almost kicked his ass," Joey says, sighing. "I got one of Lonnie's guys watching the house now."

"That really sucks," Chris says. He sings "Personal Jesus" in his head and fiddles with a paper clip.

"Chris," Joey says, after a long pause and Chris realizes no one had been talking. "Man, he went to his folks', okay?"

"I didn't --"

"Yeah you did," Joey says, but kindly. "You should call him or something. He looked like a fucking kicked puppy after you left."

"I," Chris stammers. "I dunno. I don't think --"

"Oh, ignore what I said, for fuck's sake, and just call him." Brianna's in the background telling her dad he promised not to swear and asking if she can stay up till midnight if she only watches MTV. Chris laughs into the receiver and they say goodbye.

Lance looks blonde and bored in the photo and Justin looks fucked up. Chris can feel the bottle of bourbon in the bridge of his nose and he lays his cheek against the desk blotter and closes his eyes. He tries to remember the last good night's sleep he got and it's maybe one of those nights at his mom's, one of those nights with Lance's warm body behind him. Lance looks like he'd rather be anywhere else than at that party and Chris says "fuck it" aloud and dials the number.

Ringing and ringing and maybe he's more hungover still than he thought because it kind of echoes in his head. More ringing and the click of voicemail, of Lance's voice and Chris was sitting there when he recorded it. They were at the bar one early evening and Lance said he had twenty-seven message and scowled at the phone and changed his outgoing message to send most callers to one of his assistants instead. Chris was sitting right there and he remembers the lilting, lazy grin Lance gave halfway through and there's a pause in the message at just the right place. Chris hangs up after the beep.

The phone on his desk rings two minutes later. Chris is still just staring at the fax photo. The new fax machine is really crisp and clear and the blonde is the lightest of grays. "Yeah," he says, tapping fingers on the desk.

"I couldn't find the phone again," Lance says, and then stops halfway through a laugh. "What did you want?"

What did he want. Best years of his life and since Thanksgiving it's been long enough to get used to things like how Lance still rolls his eyes and doesn't always realize people can see him. Enough to get used to how now Lance chooses every word very carefully and never seems to say the wrong thing, never confuses enthusiasm with possibility and pretty much gets everything he decides is worth getting.

Chris chooses his words very carefully. "I'm sorry I left like that," he says, skipping over how that was exactly or why Lance cares. All these years and maybe there are some things they can take on faith.

"Business," Lance says. "I understand."

"I don't really," Chris says, pinching his nose.

"So I'm home," Lance says, after a long moment. "In Mississippi." His accent's heavy like always when he's back so it sounds like one syllable. Chris rolls the abbreviated word in his mouth like the first sip of a good wine but that makes him think of liquor and his stomach turns again.

"Yeah, Joey said. How's that workin' out?"

"Well, it's real warm and sunny." Lance sighs and it sounds shaky through the phone. "They're waitin' for the ball to drop in Times Square. I don't know. I think maybe they'll forgive me sometime in the next thousand years or so."

"You didn't do anything wrong," Chris says automatically, and he can taste those words from a different life, from when they sat on Chris' ratty couch with a near-finished album and no real contract and Lance apologized if who he was was gonna mess things up for the rest of them.

"Well," Lance says.

"You didn't."

A long silence, and then Lance says, "So there's a big shindig downstairs?"

"Same ol', same ol'."

"It'll be two years tomorrow," Lance says, and Chris sits up. "It was, Justin and I threw this big thing every year --"

"I saw," Chris says, low.

"Yeah. I figured. My aunt called just to make sure nobody 'round here missed it. Like you could get through the goddamned grocery store without seeing it."

"Parties not as much fun without surround sound, huh?"

Lance laughs and it's as bitter as Chris was with the cops when they asked if anyone else had keys to his house. "The last time I had fun at some party in LA, Chris, would have to be... I don't even remember when. I don't. And two years ago I was having so little fun that I figured I might as well just throw everything in the medicine cabinet down with some Absolut, cause that always seemed to work for J."

Chris bites the inside of his cheek and doesn't want to strangle Justin for always being the one who gets away with things. "I never even. Christ, how did you keep it, what." He sighs.

"Nobody knew. Knows. People don't. Justin and Johnny cause that's the only person Justin trusted to call when he found me face first in my own puke on the bathroom floor. Trusted and was sober enough to remember the number of, anyway. Everyone else got paid a fuckload of money and signed papers and if they knew anything it was just your garden variety Hollywood binge."

Chris has nothing new to say except "fuck."

"C'mon, you know how that kinda thing goes," Lance says. "You remember. You haven't been out of the game that long."

"Yeah," Chris says, "but. Yeah. Your story beats my story to pieces. I got nothing good to say here, man."

"Well, my mom likes to look at that and say Justin saved my life and, y'know. I guess he did. It's fine. It'll be fine. She just has to get used to it."

"Yeah."

"I mean, I got used to it," Lance says. Chris is quiet. "I did, y'know. I know y'all think. I don't know. Justin's not the easiest thing to walk away from, and you of anyone knows that, I guess. But two months in rehab and it's not just. It's in the fucking water there, you know. Not just your glass. Things looked different after and maybe that means I never gave him a second chance but that shit was gonna kill me, man. Really it was."

"You stayed a while," Chris says, softly, a question.

"Yeah, well, sometimes I'm not as smart as I look," Lance says, like he's heard it before. Like it's an answer he doesn't like but has sort of settled on anyway.

"Don't play southern and dumb on me, you hick," Chris says. "I was there when we taught you that shit."

"Kiss my --" Chris can hear Lance's hand wrap around the receiver and talking in the background.

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?" Chris asks when Lance says hello again. Lance laughs.

"My mother does notsay hello, you old freak. She says, 'What have you done to mah boy that he comes home and thinks he knows how to cook?'"

"Blame Joey for that, man. That's not me."

"I'll try. I gotta go, she's bein' all..."

"Yup," Chris says, "I know."

"Go make an appearance at your party, man. What kind of half-ass owner are you, anyway, neglecting your hard-working staff like that?"

"Hey," Chris says, mildly. "It's a new dawn, it's a new day. Maybe this year I'll be better at this kind of thing."

"We should try, at least," Lance says and Chris feels the future wash over him like a breeze on the first day of spring, when there's finally more warmth in the air than chill.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different, but he doesn't have all the answers. He fits into your life, except not quite in a way that makes sense to you or the people around you. He doesn't scare as easily as you'd feared._

A long winter week to himself and his life looks like it used to except the days get longer inch by inch. Even if he can't tell, Chris knows it. There's a big snowstorm and he spends three days at home because the roads are all but impassable. It's okay, though, he tears through For Whom the Bell Tolls and runs Maxim in circles in the heated garage until they're both dizzy and their tongues are hanging out.

Friday after New Year's he comes in the back door after his run, sweaty under a stocking cap, two sweatshirts and an old North Face jacket, and Lance is sitting at the table in the lake room. The dogs lick his outstretched palms and for a long minute Lance doesn't look up, just bats at their ears and talks nonsense.

Chris takes off his hat and runs fingers through his hair. Lance has a tan and a new navy fisherman's sweater and when he meets Chris' eye he smiles and shrugs.

"Sometimes sunny weather's just not enough," Lance says. Maxim puts his paws up on Lance's thighs and barks in his face.

"We got the cure for that right here," Chris says. "You makin' me breakfast or what?"

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar, puts down his bags, has a drink, takes a look around, says he'll buy you dinner and makes himself at home. He stays for breakfast. He stays a while, but he doesn't get a free ride. He makes himself useful, and he makes you think about things. He makes your life look different, but he doesn't have all the answers. He fits into your life, except not quite in a way that makes sense to you or the people around you. He doesn't scare as easily as you'd feared. He doesn't scare as easily as you'd hoped. You don't scare so easily anymore, either._

 _This is the joke:_

Lance comes to the bar with Chris every day his first week back. "Got enough sitting on my ass done back home to last the rest of my life," he says, and so they drive in together and Lance handles some booking stuff while Chris spends another three days taking aldermen to lunch. He thinks he's pretty good at the political part but the whole schmoozing thing was easier when he could seal the deal with an autograph for someone's daughter.

Lance is good at that part, he's fucking great at it really, but neither of them can be two places at once. Lance isn't quite a substitute teacher, he's maybe the only guy Chris could hand a stack of contracts and a calendar and just say, "Can you, like, fix this?" Lance fixes it, gets everybody what they want without giving away the store, and when Chris comes back there's Lance sitting at his desk like he's in charge. Lance goes through the books for the bar in Toronto, too, and makes notes in the margin like "redundant expense" and "could probably get away with three, not four."

But the fact is that after a week, Chris has pretty much fixed the other stuff and now there's two guys there to do half a job.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar._

This kid who's not really a kid at all but started playing for the Bulls when he was eighteen is opening a restaurant and so they go downtown. Chris thinks they should really have their own discount card or something, twenty-five percent off food and drinks at any establishment owned by the formerly famous for something else. It's a good line and Lance laughs even when Chris has used it in a dozen different conversations.

The kid was eighteen years old ten years ago and when he's thirty-eight or forty-eight people will still think of him as young. Years and years of being surrounded by young, pretty, famous faces and none more so than Justin's. Chris knows he started out at a disadvantage, but he'd kind of thought getting out of the business, out of the sun, meant he had at least a long shot to catch up. It's an opening, and the crowd is young and rich or older and rich and starry-eyed over the kid with hoop dreams who at twenty-eight still plays with the boundless energy of a puppy. Chris understands the sentiment. He just started the game with a bit of a handicap.

Lance hands him a martini glass sloshing with something pink and Chris just stares at it. "What's this?" he asks.

"They're only making Cosmos or something," Lance says, and Chris swirls the liquid in his glass. Lance smiles and his teeth show. "I had to explain very slowly that he could, in fact, make drinks not involving Grand Marnier." Chris blinks. "It's cranberry juice with a lime twist, man, you're safe."

"I know," Chris says. He smiles back at Lance and raises his glass in a toast. "I say, fuck corporate sponsorship!" Lance laughs and they smile automatically when a wandering photographer puts a flash in their faces. After Justin, before and after the surgery, before his trip around the world, Chris had buried that reaction so far that he has two or three years where almost every picture is full of scowls, even when he was in a decent mood. His mom just sent Christmas morning photos and in every one he and Lance are smiling like he hasn't seen since all the records got broken. There's one with his mom's arm tucked into Lance's elbow, holding the thin gold bracelet he'd magically produced as a present. Chris took the picture and it's a good shot of them both so it's still propped up on the stack on his desk.

Lance eases away from an old guy with grabby hands, making that polite face like he's trying not to laugh and Chris hands him his jacket. The first day Lance was back from Mississippi, they'd had dinner out somewhere and the waitress had seen Lance's name on the receipt and asked for an autograph. "Nice thing about bein' at home, I gotta say," Lance said as she walked away, "is at least all the people who want a piece of me are, like, related." There's snow on the road and Lance drives carefully.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say._

The next day he's flipping through the paper for the football injury report and there they are, nice respectable suits and Lance's hand resting on Chris' shoulder. The caption reads: "Power Plays: Hollywood mega-producer Lance Bass with former 'N Sync bandmate and local bar owner, Chris Kirkpatrick (left), and Northwestern's B-school dean Bernie Wright, who hints Bass might be sticking around Chi-town for a guest lecturer gig."

"Fucker," Chris says through his buttered toast.

"Hmm?" Lance mutters, one hand in the scruff of Maxim's neck.

Chris slides the paper across the table.

Lance reads the caption, purses his lips, reads it again. "This guy a friend of yours?" he asks.

"Not really."

"Where do you think this came from?" Lance bats at the quote.

Chris says, "He said you were the David Geffen of your generation and asked me if I thought you'd be into it. I told him to ask you, but you were all let's get the hell out of Dodge and I guess he just decided to skip the middle part."

"Is it worth doing anything about?" Lance looks him in the eye and Chris shivers a little, because it's always cold when you're looking out at the half-frozen lake. And anyway it's been a while since someone trusted him like that, like he's been trusting Lance to deal with his bar. All those years when it was like behind the back passes with your eyes closed and you never had to worry, never had to think twice, they knew what to do, what to say for any of the others and if they got it wrong it was to make a point.

So Chris knows he could order for Lance and Lance would like it, he knows if he comes home from a meeting in the Loop with calfskin gloves that they'll fit, that they'll be what Lance has wanted to keep his fingers from freezing on the Avanti's steering wheel. But Chris thinks this might be different. It's putting it mildly to say they've taken different approaches when it comes to business, as in he hasn't built a dynasty and Lance has.

"Well." Chris rubs his hands together. "It's, it's not bad company to be in. Oprah's done it, twice. Michael Jordan. Definitely you have to have some kind of empire status to pre-qualify, I think."

"So what," Lance says. "They pay me twenty bucks to strip and the art students have their way with me?"

Chris opens his mouth and Lance winks. Chris closes his mouth and swallows. "Well," he manages. "I think, you run off at the mouth, the kids want you to spray some Midas magic on them, Bernie gets his name in the paper a few more times. It's like that."

"Eh," Lance says, wrinkling his nose. "Pass."

"Okay," Chris says.

"I mean, if I'm gonna sign up to do something, I'd like to, I don't know. It's either got to be really different or I need to, like, get my hands dirty."

"I'll call Bernie," Chris says.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you._

Chris kind of wishes he had a bigger bar, or one across town instead of out in Toronto, because Lance is good at running things but there's really just not enough for them both and Lance knows it. He says he has some business to do, anyway, and Chris offers to clear out some space upstairs at the bar but Lance asks instead if it's okay to set up shop in Chris' home office.

Chris hasn't had a bad day at work, not really, since he was twenty-five and working three jobs. The group was work but not really and this isn't hard at all, it's a gentleman's folly and on his better days he admits it. But he comes home and Lance is on the phone, yelling things about foreign distribution and percentages and "just because I'm not there to punch your fucking lights out doesn't mean you get to screw me or steal my money, Jeff," and it's like Lance is packing all the business he hasn't done since late November into one explosive conversation.

Chris doesn't know who Jeff is and he hates him already, though really he thinks he should maybe be scared for him, the way Lance is snarling.

"No," Lance says, fiercely. "No, that's not -- that. Is not. Acceptable. No. You call me back when you've fixed this." Lance claps the phone shut, waits a beat and then throws it across the room, hard. It bounces ineffectually against the thick carpet and Chris wishes he'd put in hardwood floors.

"Hey," Chris says, and by the time Lance turns, his face is composed but barely so. Chris remembers when they were the only ones who got to see that mask come off, how JC would lay a hand on the back of Lance's neck and Joey would rub his shoulders and Justin would do bad impressions of cartoon characters along with Chris until Lance was back to calm. He's not sure how to make it work as a one-man band, but he sits next to Lance on the couch and tries. He puts a hand on Lance's knee and squeezes a little.

"Yeah," Lance answers, as if Chris has even asked yet. "It's fine. I'm fine."

Chris leans back on the couch with his arm up and after a long minute Lance shifts back and against Chris' body. "How much are we talking about, anyway," Chris says. A guys like Lance buys and sells things all the time, doesn't sit on his money like Chris, like one day if he's spent too much it'll just up and disappear.

"It's not about -- it's. I'm gone, and so they think they can. They think they can fuck me."

"How much?" Chris lets his hand fall to cup Lance's shoulder and feels Lance take a deep breath beneath him.

"Twelve. Maybe a little less, but probably, yeah, twelve."

Chris doesn't believe it but he says, "Well, twelve thousand, I mean, a little perspective here. You spent more than that on clothes last week, mister I need a different suit for every party we go to."

Lance breathes in, out, in and out again, and then he tilts his head and his eyelashes dance on Chris' knuckles. "Twelve million," he says carefully.

Chris opens and closes his mouth. Then: "Do. You wanna -- I. Fuck." Lance nods a little. "I make one hell of a call to the pizza place. Okay?"

"No mushrooms," Lance mumbles into Chris' wrist. His back is hunched like an old woman's.

"Yeah," Chris says. "I remember."

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays._

Lance spends more time at Chris' house in the office after that, says he's got things with lawyers to deal with and it's fine, it just won't fix itself. He comes in every other day or so, late afternoon and they have dinner somewhere and then come back to the bar, sit in a booth, entertaining whoever's interesting. Lance has a good eye for those, too, for the handful of theater people who are fun, not overblown, the athletes who maybe have something to say other than bitching about their salaries. The bar's always been popular, good music and enough last-minute celebrity drop-ins to keep things packed. Chris thinks also maybe word has gotten around about Lance because they get more than a few long, carefully disinterested stares.

Some young cousin of Brett Favre's who Lance actually knows is at the Superbowl party they go to in the Playboy building and Chris is sure there'll be more pictures somewhere that week. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for publicity hellhounds to come howling for real, and he keeps wondering what Lance will say when they do.

Monday after the Superbowl, Chris comes into the bar alone. "So a tight end walks into a gay bar," Chris starts. Claude rolls his eyes and goes up to do scheduling. Chris reads A Farewell to Arms sitting on a stool, waiting for the Bud driver to show up his regular thirty minutes late. The door opens but he's mid-sentence and just waves a hand to the back. "You know where to put it," he says, but when he glances up to make sure there is something approximating the right number of kegs, it's not the driver at all.

The seventeen-year-old wundkerkind guitar player is standing in front of him, long brown hair with bleached tips tucked behind each ear, torn up tennis shoes so fascinating that the kid, Carey, barely looks up. "Hey Chris," he says, hands in the pockets of his tattered khakis.

"Hey kid," Chris says. He's got fine bones but a teenager's skin and none of that matters when he's got a guitar in his hands but here, mid-afternoon, he just looks like a boy not too sure of his place in the world.

"Um, what's up?"

Chris sets his book down. "Uh...not much. 'Cept I might have to ask for ID if you're gonna stick around for longer than to deliver a pizza or something."

"Yeah," Carey says, nodding. "I heard, I, I'm sorry 'bout that. Henry said --"

"Nope," Chris says. "Showin' up when and where your guy tells you to is how you get ahead in this business."

Carey stares at his feet and his shoulders sag and for a second he looks just like Lance or Justin at that age, professional to a fault.

"Ah, fuck it," Chris says. "You want a drink or something?"

Carey looks up. "I thought --"

"Don't worry. They're gonna have to slap my wrist a few times before I can't pay what they ask, and you look like you're having a shitty day, so." Carey sits at the bar and Chris moves around and behind. "What'll it be?"

"Um, just Coke is okay." Chris raises his eyebrows. Carey shakes his head. "Really, I don't really."

Chris pours two Cokes and spreads his hands out on the counter. He feels like a saloon owner in some old Western, like he should say one of the girls upstairs is bound to improve his mood, or ask Carey what's ailing him. He kind of sucks at the whole bar owning thing, when you get right down to it.

"We're reading that for school," Carey says, nodding at the Hemingway.

"Yeah? You like it?"

"It's better than The Grapes of Wrath. Shorter, at least." Carey folds his hands and stares at the oily grain on the bar. He's wearing a big, baggy t-shirt and an even bigger long-sleeved shirt on top of that and he's shrinking into the outfit like he might disappear. Long, magically nimble fingers hold each other so tensely his knuckles are white. It's just like how Lance would sit during depositions and Chris knows then why Carey's there. He really, really wants to be wrong.

"This is about Henry," Chris says, and Carey just nods, doesn't look up or ask how Chris figured it out.

Chris really wanted to be wrong. He clenches his jaw and his hands and his knees and every part of his body he can to avoid hitting the counter. "Well," Chris says, through his teeth, "you came to the right guy."

"I thought, yeah," Carey mumbles, finally raising his head. "My friend said something about you guys, like, suing or something to get away from yours, and that the guy was kind of a sleazy, uh, asshole, and, yeah."

"Yeah," Chris says. "That's about it." Carey looks up and his eyes are shining. "What's going on," Chris says, quietly. "Cause if he's --"

"No," Carey cuts him off. "He's not. I mean, he hasn't. I don't know. I think. Maybe he wants to, though. He. He looks at me funny, you know?"

Chris kicks his toe into the base of the bar. "Yeah, I know." Justin said Chris had always wanted him and Chris never thought it was true. He'd spent all those years at the beginning trying to make sure if the kids were on their knees it was with each other.

"I'm probably just being stupid, I mean, I'm not a little kid --"

"Nope," Chris says. "That's usually the thing you're right about even when you don't want to be." Carey nods and picks at his nails. "Have you signed anything with him? Long-term, I mean?"

"I haven't signed anything," Carey says, "cause my ma." Chris sighs, and Carey pulls a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket. "My ma keeps it in with her pantyhose."

Chris skims and it seems bad, it's not as bad as it could be but it's not good either, and when the Bud Light guy comes in Chris just waves him to the back. Carey's shoulders stiffen until the guy leaves again, and Chris scrawls a signature without looking at the inventory and comes around to sit next to the kid.

"Your mom know you're here?"

Carey shakes his head no. "She, I mean Henry has been, he buys her groceries and everything so she pretty much thinks he's a good guy."

"He's not a good guy," Chris says.

"No," Carey says, firmly. "And, I mean, I don't have a record contract and he said by now I should, I definitely should. But I --" He stops and Chris nudges his side twice before he goes on. "It's just that tomorrow's the first and he's supposed to come by, and I was thinking, you know, that if we didn't take anything this time that it might, I don't know. Help. For when I wanted to not do what he wants."

Tomorrow's the first and Carey's biting his lip, totally fucking scared and Chris wants to tear out Henry's motherfucking heart because there's always gonna be a kid who just wants to play, not look at the numbers, just play. "How much is the rent?" Chris asks, getting up.

"I was, I thought I'd be able to get it from this guy, but it turned out to be way more complicated and then he was, like, don't worry, you can sell it real easy and --"

Chris keys open the register. "How much for tomorrow, Carey, it's cool."

Carey says five-fifty and Chris can't begin to imagine what a shithole that's bought him and his mom and Chris thinks there's a little girl, too. He hands Carey twelve hundred and the kid's eyes go wide. "Make sure all the bills are paid up, too, and buy plenty of food so your mom doesn't have to come home to an empty fridge, okay?"

Carey fingers the money like he shouldn't take it but finally folds the wad in half and shoves it in his front pocket. "I'll pay you back," he says, seriously, and Chris nods even though he'll never take a penny of it.

"Look," Chris says, and he reaches across the bar to put a hand on Carey's shoulder, just for a second. "I can, I can help you with this, if you let me. If you let me tell Lance, too, cause me and him did this ourselves when we weren't much older than you, and there was a lot more money at stake and we came out okay. More than okay, ask your friend. Alright?"

Carey nods. "I just want to play," he says.

"Yeah," Chris says, swallowing a sigh. "Come back around this time tomorrow and Lance'll be here and we'll have something to tell your mom."

"She's gonna think I've been dealing drugs for real, man, I come home with all this cash."

"Tell her you got an advance," Chris says, and for the first time Carey smiles a little.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things._

Lance is waiting at the door. "What?" he says. "You, your message was just all serious and I was getting my hair cut and left the phone in the car, but, what? Is it JC?"

Chris frowns. "It's not JC, it's not. They're all fine, far as I know." He sighs. "Let's sit down." Lance squeezes Chris' forearm, his brow worried and Chris shakes his head. "It's just business, it's. It's okay, I just want. I need you to help me figure something out." Lance loosens his grip but doesn't really let go, and they sit like that on the couch, always touching while Chris tells him about Carey.

Lance blows out an angry breath and his nostrils kind of flare. "Where's the --" he starts, and Chris hands him the contract. Lance reads it through twice and then breathes out again, more calmly this time. "It's okay," he says, and his hand is on Chris' thigh and Chris covers it with his own.

"Yeah?" Chris says. He'd thought so, maybe, but it's been a while since he was reading those from the end of someone getting screwed. He sighs.

"Yeah," Lance says, "it's, it's pretty weak and I think if we can get the mom to sign with someone else instead that would be most of it, and if we need we can get this Henry asshole in a room and explain how things work the other way." Lance says this calmly, pissed as all hell but speaking calmly and Chris thinks he might explode inside except Lance seems pretty sure it'll be okay. Maybe Lance learned some things in LA worth keeping.

"Will you come tell him tomorrow?" Chris asks.

"Yeah, sure," Lance says, and Chris nods gratefully. The third time Chris says thank you, Lance says, "Seriously, it's not like I've got somewhere I've absolutely got to be."

Carey and Lance sit at one of the booths and Lance explains how it will have to work, how Carey will have to tell his mom he doesn't want to work with Henry anymore and maybe why if she doesn't get it at first. Carey looks down and clenches his jaw but says okay.

Chris drops in and out of the conversation because Carey seems calmer when he can just focus on one person and Lance is the one who knows what he's talking about. He perches on the edge of the seat and Lance is telling Carey he'll need a new manager.

"But it's cool," Lance says, "Chris and I know plenty of people, good people, who are gonna fight over you when they find out you're a free agent." Carey looks unconvinced. "You got angel's wings for fingers, kid, and believe me when I say I've seen enough half-assed kids with no rhythm make it. You're gonna fly by all them before you graduate high school, if that's what you want."

"I want to play," Carey says, and Lance smiles gently, and Chris thinks maybe he's thinking of Justin, too, of a diner in Orlando at three in the afternoon and Justin saying he just wanted to sing over and over until Joey threw him over his shoulders and ran out into a rainstorm.

"Then that's what you'll do," Lance says.

"I..." Carey looks at Chris, and then back at Lance. "Isn't this what you, like, do? You manage people, right?"

"Well," Lance says, sounding every inch like Johnny on a day they all wanted a bigger show, a longer album, another tour. Carey's face falls.

"Lance usually handles actors, now," Chris says, gently. "But we know some really great people, seriously, they won't jack you up or anything, we promise." Carey nods into his Coke. "We're gonna get you just the right guy, man, I swear."

"Okay," Carey says like a little boy. Chris and Lance look at each other over his head and Lance shrugs. Chris shrugs back. Not his call.

"Make you a deal," Lance says, bending in. "Until we can find which of those guys is the best for you, it'll be me."

Carey's head snaps up. "For real?"

Lance pats his back. "For real. This really isn't the kind of thing I do anymore, but until things get worked out, I'll make sure we get you a good deal and a contract and hit the ground running, okay?"

Carey smiles so wide it's like his face might break and they all laugh.

"We're gonna call Henry," Lance says, "so you go on home, hang with your mom. I'll call when things are okay, but don't worry about this any more, y'hear me?"

"Yessir," Carey says, and Lance just shakes his head, says, go on, get out of here.

Chris calls Henry over, saying he wants to book some regular things, but he sits downstairs at the bar while Lance meets with Henry in the office. "I think maybe, you know," Lance says. "Maybe it's better." Chris doesn't disagree, and when Henry stalks down the stairs he knows Lance has gotten what he wanted and maybe then some.

Henry stops and stands across the bar from Chris. He shakes his finger, his chin waggling with each breath. "You," he snarls. "You think you can send your boyfriend to do your dirty work. You don't have the balls to run a business for yourself."

Chris squeezes a towel in one fist and makes himself smile sweetly. "Get out of my bar," he says. When Henry's gone, Chris looks up and there's Lance standing at the top of the stairs. He nods at Chris and comes downstairs carrying both of their jackets.

"Let's go home," Lance says.

Dinner and they talk about Carey and Chris feels better knowing Lance is there to make sure things get fixed. Chris knows sometimes he wants to fix things in messy, mad ways that don't actually stop them from happening again.

Lance spends the next day perched at the end of the bar, shouting questions up to Chris about ideas for getting around the laws that mean Carey can't play in half the city's blues clubs. Chris is in favor of paying people off. There are early birds and then it's happy hour and they leave before the opening act because it's been a long couple of days. In the car in the garage, Lance puts his hand on Chris' knee and says, "You did a good thing there, with Carey."

"You --"

"No, it was. He must have been scared to death, and he knew he could come talk to you. He's lucky you were around."

Chris stares at the dashboard, one foot out. "He's lucky you were," he says. The car door chimes and they go inside.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans._

It's Groundhog Day and it's not a sign that there are supposed to be six more weeks of winter. Chris believes in fairy tales, he has to, look at where he came from, but he's never bought into simple superstition. It's been warm enough to snow big fat flakes three days in a row and then the temperature edged up a few degrees that morning until it rained instead. The wind chill will kill them all next week for sure but at least there was a day of sunshine in between.

It was a short, sunny day and they told Carey they'd sit down with his mom tomorrow. They always go to bed now at the same time, even if they've been working on different things and not watching a movie or anything. Chris yawns or Lance stretches his arms above his head and someone looks at someone and shrugs and that's how they know. They walk up the stairs together, slowly but not because of Chris' knees, just because they're talking, usually, still, about that day or the next. They stand in the hallway with open doors at their backs and there's always a moment when they've talked too long, when there's no way to stretch out the conversation, and Chris catches himself more than once wanting to tell a long, involved joke that will keep them there another hour.

Chris can't remember how people say good night. He doesn't think he knows how to turn around and close his door behind him, and so he tells Lance he's been thinking of having a comedy night at the club and what does Lance think of the idea. Really he's just now thought of it but it doesn't seem like a horrible idea.

"What do I think of the idea?" Lance's forehead is scrunched and Chris leans against the corridor wall. His hallways are really wide, he never noticed that before.

"Yeah," Chris says, "what do you think? Tuesdays, you know, Tuesdays are a little slow. Maybe we could get some funny guys in, break up the routine a little."

Lance grins and fiddles with his watch. He looks up and says, "You're a funny guy."

"Sure," Chris says, "I'm a regular laugh riot. I'm talking about a professional, here. What do you think about that? I think it could work, it could be something new. New and improved. Get your funny guy right here, all fun all the time."

"I think you're nuts," Lance says, laughing. "Say goodnight, Chris, it's a long day tomorrow." Lance steps forward to give him a hug, because they do that now, most nights, they hug and then they close their doors and go to sleep.

Lance steps forward and Chris says, "Goodnight, Chris," with a smile, and Lance smiles back and leans in to the hug and kisses him. Kisses Chris. On the mouth, and now with a little tongue and all this, all these nights and Chris has been stalling and not thinking about why exactly and it takes a minute but he remembers, finally, to close his eyes and kiss Lance back.

Chris feels the back of his head collide with the wall but it's Lance who says "ouch" for him, soft and low against Chris' ear where he's stroking little circles with his thumb. Chris doesn't think it really hurt but he's not really thinking about much at all except Lance pressed up against him and his own fingers where they've wandered up the back of Lance's shirt and, fuck, they're making out in his hallway. His hallway, of all the places for this to finally happen. This is real, this is happening finally and then he admits to himself that he's been waiting for it for a while now.

It's finally happening and it's been almost three months so maybe Lance isn't going back. It's been almost half his life since they met. It has been half of Lance's, Lance's smooth soft young face under his lips and Chris lets his hands fall to his sides, rests his palms flat against the wall for support, tries to stand on his own. Lance doesn't step back but kind of leans out, away.

Chris puts one hand on Lance's neck and pulls him into a hug. He doesn't want to let go, but he does, and Lance steps back this time with a shy, downcast smile. "G'night, Lance," Chris says, the name heavy in his mouth.

"Sleep well," Lance says, before he turns, and so of course Chris doesn't. For a couple endless hours he thinks it would be a good idea to just get up and go into Lance's room. For a couple of hours after that he thinks that's the worst thing he could do. He finally passes out for the couple of hours that are left but when his alarm goes off at nine it feels like he didn't sleep at all.

Lance is sitting on the living room floor, watching some game show and scratching Jenny's belly. He smiles when he looks up and says, knowingly, "Did you sleep okay?"

Chris laughs. "No. You?"

Lance cradles the little dog in his arms. "Been up since six." He stands carefully without putting her down and crosses to Chris.

"I think," Chris says, and then finishes the rest quickly. "I think tonight we should try sleeping together." Lance raises an eyebrow, and Chris says, "Not, I mean just in the same bed. I don't mean --"

"Yeah," Lance says. "I think that's wise."

Chris snorts, he can't help it. "You think it's wise?"

Lance shakes his head. "Shut up, funny man. We gonna run today or what?"

Carey's mom says Henry's name like a curse and reads things carefully before signing them, and they all four go to dinner after to celebrate. Lance's hand rests on the tablecloth so his knuckles butt up against Chris' and Chris laughs too much, too loudly. He tries to keep his legs from jiggling up and down but doesn't really succeed.

"We should make a toast," Lance says, holding his water glass up and nodding at Chris.

"Right," Chris says. "So, a kid walks into a bar --"

Lance rolls his eyes and throws his dinner napkin onto Chris' plate. "I'll do it," he says, and Chris lifts his water, too. "To second chances," Lance says.

They're home and both yawning by ten p.m. and it's like some weird arranged marriage all of a sudden, kind of awkward and like they haven't known each other for a million years. Chris flips off the news and stands up, knees cracking. He claps his hands together but can't think of anything to say that's not too deliberately funny. But Lance stands up, too, and they go upstairs, and there's still a moment when they stand there like scared little kids and not grown men. Finally Chris says, "My bed is bigger."

Lance laughs and kisses Chris' cheek in a flash. "My stuff is in my room," he says, and then pauses. "My clothes. For sleeping."

"Then go get 'em," Chris says, going into the room.

Lance comes back in sweats and a t-shirt and Chris is brushing his teeth with the bathroom door open. He swallows some of the toothpaste by accident because they're really going to do this, they're doing it on purpose and not because anybody forgot to tell anybody's mom they'd both be visiting. He thinks he's probably too old to be this worked up over just sharing a bed with a guy, and then he says, around the foam in his mouth, "I really meant, I mean. We're not. I don't think we should."

Lance stares at him like he's insane and Chris steps into the bathroom, spits and splashes water into his mouth. Lance is sitting on the edge of the bed when he comes back, knees pressed together, back straight. Chris doesn't think he's ever seen Lance look so uncomfortable.

"Really this shit is supposed to get less awkward as you get older, isn't it?" Chris says, and Lance looks like he's smiling despite himself.

"It's not like we've never, um, you know. Slept together," Lance says.

"Right," Chris says. "Though to be fair that was before you decided to attack me in my hallway, so I'm not sure --"

Lance starts laughing and Chris shakes his head at the both of them, overgrown teenagers and totally incapable of having a real conversation after all these years. "So what's your plan?" Lance asks.

His plan. Chris' plan is maybe anything that doesn't include a few inches of drywall between him and Lance at three in the morning. "Well," he says, and he puts out his hand. Lance takes it and Chris pulls him to his feet. "I figured, you know. We figure out who sleeps where, on what side I mean, and then if you're really nice I might let you attack me again. But, like, just a little. Because I'm kind of old and I scare easily."

"You have a side?" Lance says dryly, looking at the big empty bed.

"No, but, you know. It's like geese." Lance raises an eyebrow. "Like, once you pick which side, it's like, you can't really just wake up in a week and decide you want the other one."

"Do you care?"

Chris looks at the big empty bed and all the pillows and he can't remember for the life of him if Justin had a side, and then he realizes he's pretty fucking old and scared to be thinking about that at a moment like this. "It's been, I've been sleeping alone so long, I'm gonna kick you no matter what," he says. He realizes they're still holding hands and he squeezes a little. "You, uh."

"I don't care," Lance says quickly. "We could, we could flip a coin."

Chris puts his hand on Lance's waist. "We could wrestle for it."

Lance shifts into the touch. "Except I think one of us would have to care. Both of us, I mean, we'd have to be fighting over it."

"You don't care?" Chris asks.

Lance looks down through his eyelashes and the corner of his mouth quirks up. "As long as my side is next to your side," he says, "I'm not gonna be makin' any complaints."

Chris dives onto the bed and rolls onto his back, wagging his finger at Lance all come-hither. Lance looks down at him. Chris says, "That would be your cue to, like, you know. Attack me in some sexy and yet not threatening way."

Lance walks on his knees across the bedspread and puts a hand on Chris' shoulder, pushing him back. "Did I just never notice before that you were this bossy?" Lance asks, dipping to kiss him.

Chris kisses him back. "Only in bed," he says. In his big formerly empty bed, he kisses Lance back and doesn't let things get out of hand because second chances are really pretty fucking terrifying. He pulls back from the kiss and pushes down the covers so they can climb in.

Chris wakes up with his head on Lance's chest and one leg stuck out behind him like a crane. He jerks up before he really comes awake and then he can't see anything because it's bright in his room in the morning and Lance is still kind of tan and blushing like a ripe peach. His hand flutters down like he wants to rub Chris' leg for him and Chris leans over and stretches so his arms extend over Lance's chest.

"Did you sleep alright?" Lance asks.

"Yeah," Chris says. "You?"

"Mmm," Lance says, and then Chris wakes up for real because that's just kind of a lethal slow lion sound to have in his bed and really he's not entirely coherent until he's had coffee.

"Good," Chris says. "Because, you know. The sleeping plan only works if we actually, like, get some sleep."

Lance yawns and covers his mouth. "The sleeping plan?"

Chris sits up straight. "You know. We sleep together. In order to, like, get sleep."

"Riiiight," Lance says, smiling. "Do you think if I take the other side of the bed tonight maybe you'll wake up less crazy?"

"Not likely, no. And also, like geese, remember?"

"Right," Lance says, "okay, well, the menagerie is probably waiting downstairs, so."

Chris ruffles his fingers through Lance's hair and gets out of bed. "Today is gonna be a good day," he says.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while._

Chris isn't superstitious but he knows better than to say things like that. He blames it on having a leonine Lance in his bed and not being awake yet when his phone rings at two and it's a reporter from the New York Post who wants to know if it's true that Lance and Justin have broken up and Lance is living with him.

Chris hangs up. He doesn't really mean to but then he has, like some reverse crank call and all he can think of is once when Britney called and Justin crumpled a newspaper next to the cell phone and shouted they were going into a tunnel. Everyone except Lance had found that funny and Chris remembers calling Lance "dad" for a week. He knows he needs to get Lance and tell him about the call, ask him what he's supposed to say or if he should keep hanging up because god knows they'll keep calling, he owns a bar for chrissakes, it's not like he can just stop answering the phone.

Lance is working at home today, at Chris' home and yes, well, Lance and Justin have broken up and Lance is pretty much living with him and technically they're sort of sleeping together and Chris has spent all morning trying to either work or read Hemingway but really just staring off into space thinking about how it felt waking up with his head on Lance's chest. So the woman with the snide, staccato voice has caught him off-guard but he hasn't forgotten everything he knows about gossip and only some of that should be something he says when she calls back. They always call back.

He groans and puts his head down on his desk and when he opens his eyes he's staring right at the clipping service fax, and there's a picture of them at the Superbowl party, the one with Bernie, another from some party Chris can't distinguish from the other parties they've been to that month except it was maybe on a boat. It very belatedly occurs to him that they all get this exact same fax, that since before New Year's Justin has been getting cut-out photographs and captions of him and Lance all over town.

The phone rings and Chris answers it with a constant, thudding pain in his stomach.

"Oh, good, you're there, you left your cell sitting on the kitchen counter, it was just ringing and ringing," Lance says in a rush, and Chris folds the fax on his desk into careful quarters and then eighths.

"Yeah," Chris starts, and then the second line bleats. "I sort of, I accidentally hung up and now they're calling back."

"Wait, who are you talking about?"

"Page Six, who are you talking about?" The second line blinks and then goes solid. Claude must have gotten it.

"Page Six? Why is -- I was, I just wanted to tell you that I think Maxim is maybe sick or something, he's puking, like, all over your living room rug and Graciela called the vet already, but I thought you might want to come home."

"Fuck," Chris says.

"Page Six?"

"Fuck. Yeah, they, she's got something about you and Justin and you being here and I kind of, uh, like, dropped the phone." Claude yells up the stairs and Chris just yells back, "yeah, I know."

"Why -- oh," Lance says. "You're the only one they can call directly."

"Well," Chris says. "Yeah. Yeah. She called back. She's on hold. You want me to hang up on her again?"

Lance tells Graciela in Spanish that he's coming, he'll drive, and then comes back. "Look, you can say whatever you want, but I pay people a lot to deal with these things."

Chris hits the button twice and says, "Whoops, looks like she got disconnected."

"Okay," Lance says. "Look, I, um, I can't lift the dog with the phone in one hand."

"You're going right now?"

"I, Graciela said there's maybe some, uh. Blood. I'm sure it's fine, we're gonna take her car cause there's more room in the back but do you just want to meet us there?"

"Fuck," Chris says. The other line rings again and he throws a pen across the room. "I'm on my way."

Lance is leaning against a heartworm prevention poster when Chris gets there. Graciela is sitting in a bright orange plastic chair with her ankles crossed. "He's with the doctor now," Lance says right off, a hand on Chris' forearm. "They'll come tell us when there's news."

"Hubo sangre?" Chris says to Graciela.

"Un poquito," she says, waving her hands apologetically.

Lance's hand is warm and smooth on the back of Chris' neck and Chris breathes deeply and laughs ruefully. "At least we're well-rested for our day from hell," he says, and Lance chuckles into Chris' hair.

A few eons of reading last year's Dog Fancy and Chris convinces Graciela to go home. Lance stands outside the double glass doors and calls his publicist.

"Any word?" Lance asks, a flood of arctic air following him back in.

Chris shakes his head no. "What do the talking heads say?"

Lance rolls his eyes and sits in the plastic chair next to Chris, slumps down halfway. "The ball's in my court. Our court. His publicist isn't gonna comment."

"He must be really pissed," Chris says. Justin's always been polite but among the five of them he's never ignored a fight unless he was too ticked to see straight. That was how it used to work, anyway.

"Well," Lance says, sighing. "It's actually, we have the same publicist. Or did. Whatever."

"You gave him your publicist?" Chris decides he hates talking with Lance about Justin, that just because they've all known each other forever doesn't mean that one night of the sleeping plan is enough to withstand all that history. He doesn't know why he ever thought it was necessary or a good idea and he tries to breathe evenly with his eyes down, tries not to let the early-morning warm smell of Lance slip through his stiff fingers.

Lance says, "I think she said something like, 'He presented a compelling argument that his career would better benefit from our expertise.' Honestly, I have others, the company has like twenty. He can have her." Chris is sure that Lance has been paying her overpriced bills for years now and that this qualifies as some kind of Hollywood bitch-slap power move. He puts his hand on Lance's knee. Lance sighs again. "But she's still not going to comment."

"All these years and we're back to no comment." Chris lets his head hang loose, takes his hand off Lance.

"We never said no comment," Lance says, tightly. "And we never lied."

"We lied all the time." He's been lying to himself the whole time, and really the last two days were the worst of it, lies that looked like promises, that shimmered with some vague kind of future at the edge of the horizon. Chris kind of feels like puking himself.

Lance sighs and puts his arm around Chris' back like that's some kind of answer. "We never lied about the things that mattered," he says. He squeezes and says, "Here comes the doctor."

The dog has a small stomach tumor and has to stay overnight and then probably overnight again after the surgery. Chris signs papers with sweaty hands and quivers when Lance touches his back. "We'll come back in the morning," he says, and he drives Chris' car home.

Chris is morose, he's totally fucking maudlin and morose and all these years of making his own literature degree and he should be able to come up with more M-words for completely miserable. Miserable and maudlin and morose, and when Lance hands him a cup of hot tea and settles into the couch beside him, Chris adds melodramatic. "I'm just worried," he says, and Lance nods. There are things they learned a long time ago, all of them, when to stay at arm's length until the storm has passed. Except Chris doesn't want Lance at arm's length.

"This is a thing that matters," Lance says. "Whatever we're calling this. Right?"

Chris reaches down without thinking to rub the back of Maxim's head and comes up dry. Lance grabs his hand and he's warm, Lance is always warm and Chris is always cold and that's making the whole thing simpler than it is, than it ever could be. Still, Chris' skin is pebbled with goosebumps and Lance strokes his thumb across Chris' collarbone like he can read what Chris won't say in the Braille there. Chris looks at Lance and says, "Yeah. It matters."

"It matters to me," Lance says, pressing a kiss to Chris' temple. Lies that seem like promises and lately Chris believes Lance before he believes himself.

"It's almost been three months," Chris says, sitting up straight and tucking his leg under Lance's so they face each other on the sofa. "I think he's thinking you'll come back, that's why he won't say. So you don't have to take it back."

Lance chews at his lip. "Like Britney."

"Yeah, and, well. Like me," Chris says. "Like three months is just, yeah, like a vacation. Just some distance after a bad fight and he got that so why can't you."

"It wasn't just a fight, I told you."

"Yeah," Chris says. "Yeah, I know. Does he?"

"He's not -- Justin has never been stupid, Chris."

"Everybody's stupid when it comes to love, it's not about --"

"Okay. Okay, I get it." Lance scrubs at his face and runs his hands through his hair. He laughs a little. "You, you know, I mean -- when I called. When he was with you, and I called, I had to -- it took me, like, an hour of guessing all these stupid aliases to try to find the right room. That kind of thing, you think, sure, I'm gonna call and say the right thing and he'll come back and instead I spent an hour going through every fucking obscure singer I could think of and the whole time, the whole damn time the room was in your name."

"I'm the one who answered the phone," Chris says, six years in a flash of skin and sweat and the insistent buzzing of seventy-second-floor reality calling.

Lance ducks his chin and there's just as much before between them as ever but somehow it doesn't seem quite so crushing to Chris. "I thought you were gonna hang up," Lance says.

"Wouldn't've made a difference," Chris says. "He wanted, he was ready to go back." Chris knows it's true but it's different to say out loud. He doesn't sound quite as maudlin as he'd expected.

Lance doesn't deny it. He runs his fingers across the back of Chris' hand. "This matters," he says, softly. "I'll, I'll call whoever. I'll tell them to confirm it."

Chris catches one of Lance's fingers between his own. "You're really not going back."

"There's nothing to go back to," Lance says.

 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway._

Things move really fast after that. Out of his cadre of corporate staff, Lance picks some woman named Marisa for publicity stuff and now Marisa calls five times an hour, or maybe it just feels like that. Chris isn't sure if Lance expects or wants him to be a part of these strategy sessions but usually he just grabs his book and goes in the other room.

They only really talk about it once, the first day, when Chris snaps, "My dog is lying in some animal hospital and you want me to debate the relative merits of necessary television appearances?"

Lance looks down and says, "No, no, of course not, I'm sorry. This is my thing, I'll take care of it."

Lance takes care of it without any television trips, and it's not like they don't all have years of footage to use while reading Marisa's carefully worded statement in clipped, accent-free voices. Justin never comments. Chris never comments because, really, what could he say. Joey doesn't have to ask if he should stay quiet, too, and no one can find JC. Not even Chris can find JC on the day he finally gives in and tries the number he has, what feels like four dozen digits dialed over and over and there's just this low siren song echoing emptily on an Italian yacht.

Lance has Claude get two of the bouncers to stand outside the bar during the day for the first week. For a week it's pretty awful, too many calls, too many people in the bar looking for a scoop.

It's not that Chris thinks people don't know he's at least sometimes, more recently more than sometimes, pretty gay. But he doesn't think an army of publicists would know what to do with the awful week when Lance still sleeps in his bed but they barely touch. It's better just to stay out of the whole mess.

Lance comes out of the office with a long, drawn face and paper cuts from going over the same set of community property documents again and again. It's just a week but the clipping service has to overnight the stack of articles and transcripts because there's too much. It's a week and it sucks but by the end of it, Maxim's sleeping on the living room rug in a lukewarm sunny spot and Francis Bean Cobain has gotten arrested for vandalizing Lola's car and people move on.

People stop calling, except JC, who calls at a decent hour for a change but probably only by accident. Chris leans on his kitchen counter and JC says, "You know, it wasn't just a process of elimination that made him pick you. You were always the stubborn one."

Chris walks through the house to the office and lays a hand on Lance's shoulder. "You have like eight thousand employees," he says. "So I'm assuming that includes a coupla lawyers. Let someone else sweat the details."

"But he's -- there's, with the house. It's so fucked up."

"One of those paper-pushers somebody you trust?" Chris asks.

Lance stutters, "I. I don't know."

"If they're smart enough to work for you, they've got to be smart enough to know it would be a really bad idea to fuck you over. You gotta -- let them earn their keep, man. This is no good for you."

Lance sighs. "I know. I know. I'm sorry."

"No, it's." Chris runs his hand down Lance's chest from behind and Lance rolls his neck back and meets Chris' eyes. "I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into," Chris says. "I'm sorry I haven't been --"

"Oh, Chris. What were you gonna do about it?"

"Well," Chris says. "I'm gonna aim for not being a childish asshole about the fact that, you know, your ex-boyfriend didn't fall off the face of the earth when you left him."

Lance grins weakly. "They still would've wanted a comment," he says, and Chris laughs.

"Let's go to bed," Chris says.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway. Things get worse, but nobody leaves._

Now they don't always go to bed at the same time but they're always there together, Chris on his side and Lance on his, until sometime in the middle of the night when they get all wound up anyway. They're not fucking, but Chris only thinks that's weird when he imagines trying to explain it to someone else, and he'd gotten used to things not making sense to the outside world a long time ago. So they don't fuck, but they kiss, at first just before bed, nothing out of hand, nothing to where they're even really breathing hard.

Within a few weeks after that week that was so awful, it's not just before bed, it's while Chris is making an omelet or Lance is stopped at an intersection. It's Chris leaning across his own desk from the wrong side while Lance is on a conference call to the people who've been making decisions without him. Chris almost staples his shirt to Lance's hand that time, his chest skidding across a sheaf of notes when Lance grabs him by the collar. They're not really breathing easy at the end of that but Lance has to answer a question so things stop there.

Kissing Lance is this dizzying, maddening experience and Chris' knees always hurt but he thinks they used to be stronger because it's been a long time since he's been so worked up about just some kissing. He's not exactly afraid of sex with Lance, though in the shower one morning he admits to himself that he's totally fucking terrified because Lance never really said he was staying. Just that he wasn't going back.

Chris thinks it was easier when all he was scared of was Justin. Now it's the whole world and every day there's maybe something that calls Lance away. Some woman Justin'd been in a movie with tracked Lance down the day before, spent ten minutes on the phone trying to convince Lance that Justin was miserable, that Justin was locked in the house's recording studio and wanted Lance to come back. Chris had sat next to Lance on the piano bench. When Lance hung up, he just shook his head. "They didn't even have any scenes together," he said.

Chris steps out of the bathroom and Lance is sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, car keys in his hand and Chris thinks, today. He's going today. Someone who actually matters called and convinced him. Chris swallows and shivers but the shivering's just because his blood warmed in the shower and in the big bedroom there's a lot of air.

Lance holds up the keys and shrugs. Chris remembers to breathe, but barely. "It won't start," Lance says, and it takes Chris a full beat before he realizes Lance means the car, it's the car that won't start, Lance just needs the car jumped. Chris fingers the towel where it's tucked in around his waist and nods because he can't for the life of him think of what to say. Lance reaches out and trails his fingers down one of the long scars on his knee and Chris shudders again. Lance stands up and kisses Chris quickly on the lips. "If you think you can remember how to dress yourself, we could just go together. I'm supposed to meet Carey at noon."

Lance's hands are hot enough to boil blood where they've come to rest on Chris' sides so he just nods again. He kisses Lance instead of trying to speak and then Lance's fingers are over his own. When Lance yanks the towel off Chris can't decide if he wants to laugh hysterically or just throw Lance down on the bed. He thinks they haven't been fucking for a reason but goddamn if he can remember why.

"You do remember how to dress yourself, right?" Lance is pressed up against Chris and his ass is totally freezing but his front side is just on fire. The corner of Lance's mouth curls up and Chris steps back. Lance pushes the towel against Chris' chest.

"Since you were but a wee young thing," Chris says, and when Lance laughs and turns, Chris snaps the towel out and smacks Lance in the ass. "Go make breakfast, you tramp."

"Whatever you say," Lance answers. "But don't take too long or I'll come up here and show you how the big boys do it." He closes the door on his way out like there's some kind of privacy left to be had between them and Chris picks a pullover because no way in hell can he deal with buttons right now. He can barely fit into his jeans.

Lance meets with Carey at the bar most days after school, sometimes earlier when the kid's got parent-teacher conferences or whatever. They're trying to figure out how to get him into Buddy Guy's or the other big blues clubs because he's seventeen but you don't play a slide guitar like that in a strip mall.

Chris had been within spitting distance of finishing Hemingway and ready to tackle Gertrude Stein because Hemingway said she taught him how to write like a man and that's good enough recommendation for Chris. But then Lance asked Claude what it would take to tear down the back wall and make room for another hundred people and an honest-to-goodness dressing room, so now Chris and Claude spend most afternoons considering different options for that. It's not really Lance's call, it's not quite the answer Chris would have given but maybe it's one of those times they make a point by getting it wrong. On his way back and forth Chris usually yells something like, "just pay them off already, Mr. Clean," and Lance throws a balled-up napkin at him. He usually misses. Chris tests the new intercom by singing Joni, "oh you're a mean old daddy but I liiiiike you," and when he comes back Lance rolls his eyes. Carey looks from Chris to Lance and back and smiles. He's a smart kid.

Lance doesn't stick around for the bands, probably at least a little because three evenings in a row he'd been cornered by guys who wanted to know what Justin had done, if Lance was single, if it was true that now there wouldn't be a reunion tour. Plus Lance says the time difference works in his favor, means he can do business into the night and be ahead of everyone else in the morning. He does a lot of business, and Chris doesn't ask many questions because Lance never looks like he wants to talk about it. Chris doesn't know how much of it is divorce-type stuff and how much is just the work Lance'd been neglecting all along.

He asks about Carey, though, and Lance talks and talks about the kid and how good he is and how it's been so long, it's been since Meredith that he really actually managed a real-live person and didn't just sign on the executive producer line.

"We went by the studio today," Lance says one night, spitting mouthwash into the bathroom sink, "and, Chris, you should've seen him. He stood there at the soundboard like he was gonna faint he was so excited. We're just there to take a look around and I thought he was gonna hang on my leg, he wanted to stay so bad."

Chris leans on the counter, marble smooth under his palm. Chris tries to leave at a decent hour now and days have become a thing he mostly wants to get through to get to this part. He puts a hand on Lance's waist and kisses the crease in his neck, because he can, because they always kiss before bed and sometimes it starts like this, against the bathroom sink. Chris opens his eyes over Lance's shoulder while Lance licks his ear and he almost doesn't recognize himself, he looks so happy and patient and like he did during the best parts of the best years of his life. Only older. Older and wiser, he thinks on the good nights.

Lance tongues his jaw and Chris decides this is a good night. Maybe it's good enough. He keeps thinking someone should know, that he should know or Lance should know that whatever it is they've been waiting for is there or has come and gone or done whatever it should have done. They've known each other for a million years and that should make things easier except really it just makes it all that much more significant.

He's like a fucking fourteen-year-old girl waiting until everything feels perfect because it's not like he really thinks at this point they actually won't ever. But they're in his shiny bright bathroom and Lance is hard in his boxers and Chris stands between his parted legs, knees alternating like entwined fingers. There's nothing wrong with any of that, nothing even in the same universe as wrong, and if they don't stop now it'll probably all happen anyway. He squeezes his eyes tight and pulls away.

"It's late," Lance says, breathy and low and Chris can't look at him yet, if he looks now he'll forget why he pulled away, because he must have had a reason even if he can't remember it now. In the mirror he looks scared to death and he thinks maybe that's the reason, that when it's right and perfect he'll be less terrified. Lance sweeps his hand down Chris' cheek and murmurs, "c'mon, it's late." Lance always stops when Chris stops. Lance is never the one who stops.

Chris wakes up and Lance's nose is pressed to the hollow of his throat, air fluttering across Chris' collarbone on each exhale. Chris' arm is outstretched on the pillow and his legs are tangled around Lance's knees. He wants to scratch his nose but he thinks it will be like throwing a rock into a pond of ducks, all feathers and flurry and the moment will be gone. He's thinking really clearly for having just opened his eyes.

He moves in fractions of inches until his hand curves over Lance's crumpled hair and he can reach his nose. Lance stirs at the motion, presses his face into Chris' neck and murmurs in his sleep. Chris freezes and counts to a hundred before letting his hand fall, this time landing on Lance's back. Lance is wild hot, a little furnace in his bed and Chris thinks it's like a contact high, just being so near that kind of energy. He presses his palm between Lance's shoulderblades and Lance grumbles low in his throat.

Chris closes his eyes and tries to fall back asleep but it's so hot, everything's fiery and real and he's hard in the breath of space between his crotch and Lance's. And then Lance thrusts against him, hips circling back and around sleepily and his lips haven't moved, his head hasn't come up and maybe he's not even awake but he's pushing onto Chris. Not pushing him off, pushing toward him.

Their hips collide and Chris moans into Lance's hair, then bites his lip in embarrassment. Lance isn't even awake. Lance doesn't know what he's doing. He knows Lance probably wants this even when he is awake but there's a difference. Chris is always the one who stops but Lance always lets him and they would know, he would be less scared to move if whatever it is they've been waiting for had arrived.

Chris rubs at Lance's back, circles growing wider in circumference and pressure until Lance tilts back his neck and his eyelids flutter open. He blinks, and Chris starts to pull back but Lance leans into the embrace and kisses Chris' chin. He smiles again and sighs and murmurs something that's not a real word at all. Chris thinks he might spontaneously combust from all the warmth right there, in and under his skin, pressed up against him. He kisses Lance's temple and wriggles free in one move. "Be right back," he says, lips to Lance's forehead.

"M'kay," Lance blinks, turning his cheek into the pillow.

Chris stands with one hand flat against the wall as he tries to pee, knees shaky, and he takes three deep breaths in a row before he can relax enough to do it. He splashes cold water on his cheeks and brushes his teeth and stares at the wild-eyed old man in the mirror, half a hard-on poking out through his boxers. He spins around and sits on the counter and counts to a hundred. Terrified and scared and he wouldn't know a perfect opportunity if it came up and bit him in the ass.

When he comes back, the sun is peeking over the lip of the lake and the room is wet with the orange-blue cast of the water. Lance is sitting up in the bed, pulling his shirt off over his head and as warm as things were a minute ago, now they're just bright, infinite prisms of light and skin. Chris' feet can't move for what seems like a hundred years. Then he's on the bed, pulling Lance down by the hips so he's flat on his back. Chris hovers over Lance's chest, knees on the mattress between Lance's legs. Lance curves one hand around Chris' waist, his mouth slightly open, eyes wide awake. Chris bends his elbows and sinks onto Lance, kissing him hard. Lance doesn't stop him.

Kissing in the morning is never like kissing before bed and they've done some of both by now but this is a whole other kind of kissing. Kissing in the first degree, intent and deadly force and Chris is such a fucking scared little boy, he can't believe he's still thinking about getting some kind of sign, like Lance fucking Bass half-naked in his bed isn't a sign in and of itself, like he could possibly need some signed, sealed and delivered note from a teacher to know what he's supposed to do next. What he's going to do next, because he remembers, somewhere in the part of his brain that's not terrified and not supernovaed, that anything that really matters is this scary when you first start out.

Lips on Lance's stomach, he leaves a scratchy red trail down Lance's chest and there's a reason for not kissing first thing in the morning but when he pauses, when he hesitates for a moment Lance's fingers are in Chris' hair, dancing around his ears. Lance moans and if Chris was even thinking about stopping, if that had ever crossed his mind, he's not ever gonna even come up for air now. He stares up the length of Lance's torso and Lance looks like he always did before they stepped on stage, all what are you waiting for and come on, people, we got a show to do. Lance, who never wasted energy in practice, bouncing on the balls of his feet to feel the rush of a crowd.

Chris has one hand at the bottom edge of Lance's boxers, on the thigh beneath them. His other hand is at the elastic waist and he slides both toward each other until his fingers meet around the base of Lance's dick and his thumbs are spread wide around the curve of his ass. Just for a second he holds Lance like that in his hands, just for a second until terrified is pretty much entirely replaced by desire. Lance arches into the touch and Chris mouths him through the cotton and Lance moans "Lord" like Chris is an answered prayer.

Everything else that happens after that is gone like water on a griddle as soon as Lance moves his hand to a different square of skin, and every time Chris reaches for it like he can hold on, like if he can find a word other than _hot_ or _Lord_ or _finally_ he'll remember it all better. Once he thinks he almost grasps why he doesn't need to remember everything so perfectly because it's possible, it's possible, something is possible but god, do that again, do that again.

"Shut up and I'll try," Lance growls, pushing back, squeezing against him and Chris closes his mouth. Sometimes that helps, though in this case it just makes everything more, more, more possible and Chris thrusts again. Lance's smooth back is sloped down before him, Chris bent over it and his hand curved between Lance's lips, raw and sore and bitten. His other palm skids down the knobs of Lance's spine and Chris rears back, slams again, tearing his hand from Lance's mouth to push against Lance's chest and then lower, hotter, and Chris is totally lost except a flash of terror that when this moment is over none of the before will be enough. He pushes through it, pushes and plunges and his legs burn and the last thing he thinks before he passes out is that it's entirely possible the universe began with a big bang.

Chris wakes up and Lance is licking lazy circles up and down the inside of Chris' arm. It's like the dog crawled into bed with him except Lance is naked and sweaty and so fucking beautiful that Chris closes his eyes for a second. Lance kisses him on the mouth before he opens them again, pinning him to the bed, hands on the sides of Chris' face. Four months since Lance walked into his bar and it was maybe always going to end up like this except Chris still thinks he was the last to know. Four months ago he would have gone to bed alone and woken up alone and taken the dogs out for a run and gone to work and read his books. Maybe he would've gotten laid but it wouldn't have looked anything like this.

Lance winds down like an old battery and tucks his nose into Chris' neck, slides off his body and curls around his side. "I just want the record to show that you started this," he mumbles, the words reverberating against Chris' raw skin.

"Me?" Chris rubs Lance's shoulders and can barely muster an indignant squeak.

"You and your sleeping plan," Lance says. "And then you attacked me this morning."

"You're the one who started it, with the stripping your clothes off, and the --"

  
Lance shakes his head. "You brushed your teeth. You were preparing for the attack."

"I always brush my teeth first thing," Chris says, teasing Lance's soft brown hair into weak spikes. "You took off your shirt!"

Lance rolls onto his back, shifts and shimmies until he's resting his head on Chris' thigh and Chris is half-hard again. Lance says, "I was hot!"

"You're always hot," Chris says, and it's not a metaphor but maybe it makes some kind of sense, maybe there's something in all this that makes the kind of sense that other people would understand, too.

Lance smiles. "It's like ninety degrees in here, man."

"So?"

"It's spring." Lance bats a hand at Chris' chest. "Turn down the damn thermostat already."

Chris tries to frown but he thinks maybe he can't stop smiling. "Will you still take off your shirt?" he asks.

"Yes," Lance says.

"Do I have to do it right this very second?"

"No."

"Okay," Chris says.

"Anyway," Lance says, his toes playing with the edge of the comforter where they'd kicked it down. "I didn't know you'd brushed your teeth until you attacked me. You were in the bathroom so long I thought you'd crawled out the window or fallen down and knocked yourself out."

Chris rubs his hand down Lance's chest. "And you decide to stay here and take off your shirt? While I'm lying there bleeding on the bathroom floor?"

Lance pushes up on one elbow a little, kisses Chris' stomach and then sits up. "You were not bleeding on the floor," he says, a hand on Chris' cheek. "You were stalling. And I was hot."

"Yes you are," Chris says, starting to giggle. Lance laughs too, at least until Chris leans down to kiss him.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway. Things get worse, but nobody leaves._ _You stop being scared long enough to let things happen._

Chris drops a glass behind the counter when Lance looks up at the end of a phone call. Lance says, "whoa, cowboy," all sexy and Chris just kicks at the shards because no way are his hands steady enough to touch anything sharp right now. Lance is waiting for Carey, and Chris, apparently, is no longer capable of being anywhere near Lance if Lance isn't naked. And even then he's never entirely sure what the hell is going on. He stares at the creases around Lance's eyes and thinks, this is not my beautiful wife. He hopes maybe his hands have stopped shaking.

Lance's phone rings again and by the time Chris has come back with a broom it's practically a foreign language of figures and contracts and Chris isn't stupid, he hasn't forgotten everything he learned out in LA but Lance does it all so fast, so smoothly, that Chris long ago stopped trying to keep up and instead just sits back and watches. He thinks Lance finds the selling point innately, like how they talk about psychic memory of indigenous tribes passed from generation to generation.

That part's not new at all, that part Chris dates back to sometime maybe five minutes after Lance nailed his audition. It's the part where Lance hangs up the phone and seems to need Chris' reassurance that he got it right that Chris doesn't know what to do with. Lance doesn't seem any less good at the game except that he's only sure of himself when he has to be.

Chris wants to blame that on Justin, like he's blamed a lot of things on Justin that aren't really his fault and honestly Chris knows that, knows better. He's sure Justin fucked that guy because he was scared to death that Lance came back not just sober but unsatisfied, and he wasn't entirely wrong, and he just wanted someone to notice. Chris thinks if he were Justin he would have called Lance right away and asked him to come back. He would have commented.

Three nights when he and Lance have way more than kissed before bed, and in the morning, and in the afternoon at the bar, and Chris shouldn't let Justin have any more. He knows it, he knows Lance is right about that. Just like Lance is probably right when he says Chris should expand the bar, that maybe he should listen when this guy Gary who's a local mover-and-shaker says that Chris should think about running for the open alderman slot in the bar's district.

Chris thinks maybe the last risk he took, other than tackling Lance when of course it was going to end up like that, was starting the group. It was hating his shitty job and his shitty apartment just enough so that he wasn't unhappy, really, just disgruntled enough to be sure there was a better way. Lance is always looking for a better way, it's never worn off except maybe now, maybe Lance doesn't think leaving LA and a kazillion dollars and more power than god and trading in Justin for the classic car is really a better way.

All this time since they said they should quit while they're ahead and Lance has been married and built an empire. Chris has taken a little kid's trip and invented a fantasy job. He said he'd always work, that he'd go back to waiting tables in a minute when things stopped being fun, but then he got heartbroken and all fucking existential. And he really truly couldn't spend all the money he has if he tried. Which he hasn't, particularly. The best years of his life and he's maybe wasted all the years since then. Chris brushes broken glass into a dust-tray and when he stands back up his knees flame and burn.

Lance is off the phone, making notes to himself on a napkin. Carey walks in the door and Lance's face lights up, looks sure and ready and up for the challenge, for the risk. "Today," Lance says by way of greeting, "today, my young friend, we are going to plan ourselves a little road trip."

Carey crows, "Fuck yeah!" and Lance bats at his shoulder, phone still tucked in his hand.

"Watch your mouth," Lance says. "No swearing until you're famous enough for groupies."

Carey plops down on a stool, all long legs and floppy hair and Chris pours him a Coke. "There will be groupies on the road trip?"

"Not this one," Chris says. "But you hang in there, kid, and you'll realize there's really only one reason a guy like you ever picks up a guitar."

Carey grins wide. "To meet girls, man, I know that much." Chris and Lance laugh, looking at each other across the bar, and Carey says, "I mean, um. You know. If that's what you're into."

"Hey," Lance says mildly. "Chris sleeps with women."

Chris opens his mouth to agree and realizes he hasn't slept with a woman since he came to Chicago. They went their separate ways and maybe a half-dozen women lasted longer than one night, maybe only two or three whose face he remembers clearly. And there was Justin, and plenty of guys before and after him, way more than a half dozen, some who even stayed the night, and now there's Lance. Years of telling himself the guys had ruined him for women and maybe it's just that they ruined him for everyone else.

"Not anymore, I don't," Chris says.

"Oh," Lance says, softly. Carey sits really still, swallowing the last of his soda, and a little grin grows on Lance's face, notch by notch until his laugh lines stand in full relief and he runs his hands through his hair and says it again like a decision. "Oh," he says, and then, "Okay. So. How do you feel about South Bend?" He doesn't look away from Chris.

"When do we leave?" Carey asks.

They don't leave right away because these things take time, Lance tells Carey, even when they're done right, even when Lance is calling the owner of some blues club in Indianapolis at nine a.m. because that's about the time he's done working.

"This is --" Lance is waving his hands around excitedly after the guy signs on, that's six clubs in four states including this place in Detroit with a killer rep and the critic from the Free Press is always there when the show is good. "This is gonna be great," Lance says. "He's got most of a second set ready to fly with the band, too, and he's, I told him I'd take him shopping tomorrow, get him some nice clothes and he, Chris, he called them _threads_. He said, 'You're gonna take the price of these smooth threads out of my end, aren't you?'"

"Are you?" Chris asks. The dogs are probably ready to go out but they're still in bed, naked, Lance's phone on the nightstand and the day is cloudy and cool. It's late March and it will probably rain.

Lance rolls his eyes. "I'm not gonna let him pay for clothes. I mean, I know, I should, I'm spoiling him and how he's gonna deal with a real manager when we find him one, I don't know."

"But you want to do it," Chris says, running a hand up Lance's side to where the sheets are pooled around his waist.

"I, yeah. Okay, yeah, I do." Chris smiles and Lance leans in for a short kiss. "Do you think this is how parents feel?"

"Maybe," Chris says. "Except not so much on the trying to let their kids play in places of questionable legality."

"The bars aren't illegal, just Carey is," Lance says, like that makes sense, and Chris just shakes his head.

"Is that --" Chris stops, and Lance slides down the bed again and pulls an arm around Chris' shoulder. They shift and shuffle and Chris winds up with his head in the crook of Lance's arm, smooth and warm and he says, "kids, I mean. Is that what you want?"

Lance runs his fingers around the base of Chris' neck, up his hair backwards, against the grain. He says, "No," not so quickly, but firmly. "But I think." He sighs. "I mean, I know this is like some crazy kind of step backwards. I know that six months ago I was working twelve hours on a slow day and pushing around paper worth a billion dollars, but."

Chris can feel Lance bend in and he reaches a hand around, hugs Lance like that. All this time, half his life and he knows that Lance has to say it for it to count. He can almost hear Lance close his eyes and bite his lip, and he can feel the breath Lance takes in the rise of chest under his cheek.

"But," Lance says. "But I think this is what I want to do. You know, actual, like, people. Working with people who are seventeen and want it so bad they can taste it, who actually are as good as you say they are. Carey, I think, I think he's really that good."

"Better," Chris agrees.

"Yeah, better," Lance says, more sure. "And I can actually, there are things I know about how to help him do that that I never really got to use anymore."

"You've earned it," Chris says. "And he's lucky to have you." In his head it's like a refrain, lucky to have Lance, lucky Lance. Lucky.

"And, yeah. And it means, you know. That I'm here."

That he is. Lance is here and sometimes Chris forgets to worry that there's a world full of bright young faces to take Lance away. Sometimes when Lance is throwing the dogs a stick out on the beach and his hair's sticking up from the wind, sometimes on days like that Chris can't even remember what year it is, how long it's been, because time just stretches on and on.

"I really don't want to go, you know," Lance says, because, yeah, half their lives and most of the time they don't have to say it out loud.

Chris slides out from under Lance and says, "Funny you should mention that." Lance looks wary and Chris just smiles. He says, "I was doing, you know, it's, I was." Half of Lance's life already, almost half of Chris' and it won't be long until the numbers tip the scale, till it's always been at least that long. "Go look in the closet," Chris says. "Go on already," he says, pushing at Lance, shoving him out of the bed.

Lance puts one hand on his hip and then walks casually from the bed to the long closet, all the way across Chris' big room and he's naked and that's not so new but Jesus he wears it well, Chris thinks, propping himself up against the headboard. Lance puts a hand on the doorknob and turns back around. "This isn't going to be like that time, in Germany, when you and Joey thought it would be sooo funny if --"

"Just open it," Chris says.

Lance stands in front of the empty shelves, the long vacant rack. It's like some kind of fucking Herb Ritts photo, Lance and his broad, bare shoulders and the vast cedar-lined space over his shoulder. Chris has seen a lot of pretty pictures, he's got whole walls full of pretty pictures of Lance but this one's just for him. Lance turns and says Chris' name slowly, seriously.

Chris says, "My closets are bigger. And, you know. I mean. It's not like you need to go across the hall for a dressing room, and one of these days Graciela's gonna catch your nude morning hundred yard dash and who knows what --"

"Chris."

"Yeah." Chris looks down at the comforter and sighs. "I mean, it's not like a deal-breaker here. I just thought."

"You want me to stay," Lance says, looking over his shoulder again like maybe the closet up and left.

"Well," Chris says. He bites his lip and rubs his nose and Lance comes toward the bed. "Yeah."

Lance leans against the bed, feet still on the floor, and Chris sits up on his knees so they're face to face. He squints into the sun over Lance's shoulder, into the reflection of a thousand diamond-backed waves as wide as the ocean. Chris was eighteen years old the first time he saw the ocean, he'd driven through the night in his fourth-generation Buick and followed signs to the Florida coast. He didn't stop for breakfast, just parked in the post-dawn blush, got out of the car and walked towards the surf. At the water's edge, he let the waves kick up around his ankles, flooding his sneakers.

"I don't want you to go," Chris says. "I mean, not with Carey, I mean."

"It's not the same," Lance says.

"No, I know, of course not --"

"I mean," Lance says. "Telling me you don't want me to go, and. And asking me to stay. It's not the same."

Chris sits back on his heels. He wants to ask Lance if he wants to stay. Lance sits on the edge of the bed and takes Chris' hand, holds it gently. Chris doesn't know if that's an answer or an apology, but he remembers how in Florida there were surfers balanced on top of curls, like Playboy bunnies in how they were real only on TV. Seeing them up close like that, with all those thousands of miles spread out at his toes, pastels like a Miami Vice episode, Chris decided he could either dive in fully clothed or sit at home on the couch forever. He was eighteen and it seemed that easy, and maybe it was. An hour later, when he'd let the sun bleach him dry, he'd shaken the sand out of his hair and walked into the first ten restaurants he found until he had a job washing dishes.

Lance holds his hand and waits and Chris is forty, he's forty years old and Lance was there for the best years of his life and Chris isn't sure he's taken a risk since. He turns, leans in to kiss Lance and says, "I want you to stay."

Lance smiles and kisses him again. "I bought a ton of clothes last week," he says. "You gonna help me or is this one of those times you'll point at your knees and whine about being old?"

 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway. Things get worse, but nobody leaves._ _You stop being scared long enough to make things happen, and maybe they're a little more lasting than you'd thought._

Chris actually has four separate meetings with Gary and his pals about this whole crazy running for office idea, including one where he stands up and says, "Maybe you don't understand, I'm actually living with this guy whose ex-boyfriend is the ex-boyfriend of the girl who for a while there was America's sweetheart. This can't possibly be a good idea."

Gary shrugs and says, "Well, Chicago politics have never been boring."

"There's boring, and then there's insane," Chris says, and even Lance thinks it's funny.

"Not that you don't -- I think you'd be good," he amends, still doubled over and cackling between breaths. "You're the one who always wants to buy people off, you could probably round up enough votes to win."

"Stick to business," Chris says, pinning Lance to the bed and licking his neck.

"Well," Lance says idly. "Now that we're not, like, walking precincts or whatever, I guess you'll have time to expand the bar. And you should sell the other one if you're not gonna do anything real with it. You could get another one here. Or in, like, Detroit."

Chris raises his head and Lance moans a little, palms Chris' shoulderblade and wiggles around. "I am not buying a bar in Detroit. There is just, there is no way that actually makes good business sense."

"Then you'll really have enough time for this one," Lance says, smiling like he knows he's won, which, of course, he has.

Chris bites Lance's ear. "Will you just shut up and fuck me already, I said I'd do it."

There's planning for Carey's trip, which has to happen during his spring break, because his principal doesn't think that it's a good excuse for missing an English lit exam. Lance says, "Whatever, he's two months from graduation, and seriously the whole tutor thing is such a joke." There are parties because the people Chris knows always seem to be throwing parties for something. There's running the dogs and breakfast in the lake room.

There's a Sunday morning when both Chris and Lance sit half-dressed on his big bed and call their moms and say there's something they want to tell them. Diane says, "Isn't it awfully soon, honey?" and Lance says, "For goodness' sake, I've known him since I was sixteen." Chris' mother says, "I thought maybe I was gonna have to wait for the Enquirer to break the story, you little twerp," and, "You sure you know what you're getting into?" Chris says, "I'm not a kid."

Then Lance stands on the doorstep to the garage with the same two bags he had when he showed up in the fall. He kisses Chris on the lips and says, "I'm gonna be back before you miss me."

"I really seriously doubt that," Chris says, forcing a smile.

"If you love something, set it free," Lance says, squeezing Chris' arm, but his eyes are so shiny and wide that Chris knows he's about two seconds away from laughing.

"Yeah, yeah, get the fuck out of here," Chris says. "I'll believe the things you love come back when your ass is safely returned to my bed."

"My ass," Lance says emphatically, finger in Chris' chest, "will be back on my side of your bed, which is only maybe possibly yours, given that I have my own side and all. In nine days. At which point I may, if I am feeling both horny and charitable, let you anywhere near it." Chris picks up Lance's bags and carries them to the trunk.

Nine days and it's like a couple of decades. He calls his mom twice and talks to Joey every couple days even if it's just about the weather or what Brianna learned in school. One time Joey says, "You love him, don't you," but they'd been talking about the rumor that Justin's months locked in the recording studio are now an album and so Chris says, a little impatiently, "man, you know I'm over that, way over that."

Joey says, "Not Justin."

"He's coming back," Chris says, and Joey says, "of course he is," which is maybe the nicest thing Joey has ever said to Chris, ever.

He buys JC a kinetic-powered watch and programs it for Eastern Standard Time because that's close enough and god knows the man won't run out of energy. He calls Dani and tells her the whole story because it's been a while and she says, "good, good, I'm so glad." He takes her at her word.

He goes for his annual physical and gets more tests because he's past the big four-oh, his doc says, like by spelling it out he's not really officially middle fucking aged yet. He gets newer, stronger glasses. He works out every day and when he goes to physical therapy and runs into Keith they manage to have a semi-pleasant conversation. Keith asks how Lance is and Chris says, "He's good."

He clears out the bar in his basement and the old beer of the month leftovers in the spare fridge because he doesn't really entertain that much and people can take the night off if they have to. He and Claude look at blueprints and talk to contractors and figure out how to keep most of the bar open while the work is being done. He gives Graciela a huge bonus on her birthday and they have a fancy dinner on top of the John Hancock building.

The whole operation's too scatter-shot for spring cleaning and in his head he calls it getting the house in order but he's not really sure why or what's coming down the road, because it seems like things are in a good place. His life is in a good place, and of course Lance is coming back. Chris talks to him every morning and every night, first and last call, and sometimes also in the car or at his desk or in the lake room, watching the water. Carey is the real thing and Lance sounds like if he never had more than one client at a time he'd be ecstatic.

Day nine and Chris runs a full mile and grins like a maniac at Maxim dancing over the tips of waves on the beach. Back inside and it's possible he's even fucking humming to himself, some song Carey's been playing on the empty bar stage four afternoons a week. He comes out of the shower and Lance is sitting on the bed.

"I'm feeling exceedingly charitable," Lance says, standing and unbuttoning his pants.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway. Things get worse, but nobody leaves._ _You stop being scared long enough to make things happen, and maybe they're a little more lasting than you'd thought. He goes away, but he comes back, too._

One night the week after that they leave the bar early, together. Lance drives one-handed and raps his fingers on the base of Chris' neck the whole way home. It's been sunny three days in a row and it doesn't mean anything, it's just late spring in Chicago and that's how the weather works but Chris is glad. Chris is happy and mostly the days are still just time to get through until Lance is naked again. Half again past his sexual peak and he has to spend more time icing his knees than on foreplay but pretty much he's happy with his life how it is.

Chris sits on the couch, flipping channels, while Lance warms up something Graciela left for a late snack. Justin's face fills the TV screen suddenly and Chris' hand freezes on the remote.

"The album's almost finished," Justin says. He looks good. He looks older, but he is older, so Chris guesses that makes sense. Even Justin has to get old eventually. "I mean, I'm thirty," Justin says with emphasis, and Chris blinks. "And you can say it's about going back to your roots, or any of that. But I grew up singing and wanting to make music that somebody'd want to sing along to. I'm not saying I'll never act again. But when you're tryin' to figure it out, sometimes it makes sense to, you know. Look back. When I looked back I remembered that music will always be a part of my life. There's just been enough time for me to remember that."

The camera cuts to this new guy on MTV, cute, young, too young probably to really get what it means for Justin to say this. The guy says, "Right, right," and Justin says, "You know how it is. Breakups are bad for the heart but they're great for the art."

"Was that a factor in the split, that you wanted to get back to music?"

Behind him, Chris hears Lance say, "that little fuck." Chris turns back, reaches out a hand. Lance shrugs with his arms full of steaming plates and Chris shakes his head.

"Just put 'em down over here," he says, and Lance sets the food on the coffee table and sits next to Chris.

"I never," Lance mutters, and Chris puts his hand on Lance's knee.

On the TV, Justin furrows his brow. "I'm not saying -- I mean, Lance was a great manager. Lance is, he's, yeah, he's the guy you want to have on your side, and he did great things for my career. The acting thing was going well. But I'd never stopped writing. If you're -- it's not why we broke up, no. No. Lance wouldn't, he knows what music means to me. This was a decision I had to come to on my own. And that feels good, man, it feels real good." Justin takes a deep breath and smiles dazzlingly, clearly proud of himself for bringing it back like that.

Lance squeezes his eyes closed for a second and then cracks his neck. "We gonna watch the rest of this?" he asks.

"Not if you don't want to." Chris lifts the remote and aims but Lance grabs his wrist. "Do you want to?"

"Do you not want to?"

"Whatever you want," Chris says.

Lance rolls his eyes and says, "No, no, we're not, this is not going to be one of those things where no one says what they actually want and later we're all pissed off, I just will not do that tonight. Not that too."

"I asked you a question and you answered it with a question," Chris snaps. "I don't think I'm the one trying to avoid things here."

"Fuck," Lance says. "Fuck. I don't." He hangs his head down and scrubs at his face and Chris puts his hand on Lance's back because, yeah, this whole thing pretty much sucks in nine kinds of awkward ways. Maybe he's learned that keeping the balls in the air is mostly about picking which ones are worth catching.

"There's gonna be plenty of press," Chris says, "so, like, eventually we're gonna, but it doesn't have to be tonight. Whatever you want, really."

Lance sits up. "Let's get it over with. Let's. Just, the food is getting cold, so let's eat and you can even turn it up and then we'll go to bed and it will be over."

Chris turns it up and Justin's saying, "We're all trying to live our own lives now, you know, to move on and stay moved on and the rest of that, Lance's life, I wouldn't really know about. You'd have to ask him." Justin shifts in his chair and Chris watches Lance do the same. Justin looks more comfortable. "I hope he's happy," Justin says, and he almost sounds sincere. "I hope they're all happy, I mean, all of 'em."

"Any chance we'll see you all up on stage again?" the interviewer asks.

Justin looks down and then says, slowly, "I don't know. It -- it shouldn't take a reunion tour to get us all in the same room."

"Okay," Lance says, standing up, smoothing down his jeans. "That's, I think that's actually enough for now." Chris flicks it off immediately. "You're right, it's not like we'll, it's. We won't be able to not hear it, but I think that tonight, I --"

"It's okay," Chris says, kind of grateful himself. "Let's just, we can just --"

"The dogs will --" Lance pulls his hand back and gestures at the untouched plates. "I'll clean up, it's fine."

Chris shifts his weight, brushes past Lance to grab a cold pack from the freezer. Lance runs water in the sink and stands stock-still in front of it, hand poised above the faucet. A glass with condensation on its smooth sides sweats on the edge of the counter and an ice cube in it cracks itself in two. "I'm," Chris starts.

"Go ahead," Lance says, blinking hard. "I need, I'll be up in a minute."

"I'm not going to sleep without you," Chris says, biting the inside of his cheek.

"Just give me a damn minute," Lance says. "I'll, I'm coming. Just. I need --"

"Okay," Chris says, gently. He climbs the stairs slowly, brushes his teeth, a hundred strokes each way like his last dentist said, like Chris was four, not forty, and had never learned or something. He washes his face and clips his toenails and picks out clean boxers. He stands by the door to the hallway and it's quiet downstairs and he sighs, turns back to the bed.

He leans against the headboard and starts in on the Gertrude Stein, all long run-ons like why bother trying to come to a stop when life just goes on and on and "naturally I wanted more, but I do and can say that all that are here are those that I wanted the most, thanks and thanks again." Chris props another pillow under his left knee and lets the pages turn themselves. There's a postcard from William James and on page seventy-five it's "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself" when Lance knocks on the molding. Chris closes the book.

"You're still up," Lance says.

"I said, not going to sleep without you. I mean, I can wait, if you --"

"He's gotten enough," Lance says, falling into bed fully clothed. Chris turns off the lights, unties Lance's shoes and tugs off his jeans and shirt. He falls asleep with one arm across Lance's back, his hand curled around next to where Lance's cheek lies on the pillow.

Lance rolls him over at three a.m. and rests his hand on Chris' stomach, not lightly, pressing against Chris' gut hard. "You're not gonna --" Lance starts, but he trails off and Chris squints into the dark, pulls himself up into a sitting position, tugs Lance up along with him.

"I'm not going anywhere," Chris says.

"I, I haven't talked to him since I left," Lance says, hands clenching each other tightly. "I walked, I walked right out the goddamned door, and I went." Lance whispers, so close, so near and Chris' breath catches in his throat. "I went to the hotel where you'd been, I don't even know why, I was just there. And I sat in the penthouse suite on the floor in front of the bar for, like, a day and a half. I just, I sat there and I didn't know who to call. I didn't know who wouldn't tell me to go back, so I sat there and didn't drink and I fell asleep like that. And then I woke up, I took a shower and I went to the house and packed some stuff. And he wasn't there, so I went right to the airport."

Chris sighs. "Oh, baby. You --"

"And I know, it looks, everyone thinks I just gave up, but that was, like a year's worth of me and him talking at each other and not hearing a damn thing."

"I know."

"No, I mean. I don't know. I don't even know, it's the middle of the damn night and you're here and I'm here and this is. This is, I had no idea. I didn't come here for this, I want you to -- I didn't think I could walk in and you would, like, fix me. My life."

"You've never needed someone to fix your life, Lance."

"I," Lance sighs. "Okay, but, when this is, the time after the next few times he's everywhere and I don't know what to say, you know. You're gonna --"

"I'm not gonna tell you to go back," Chris says. "I'm really, really not. You think I don't -- he didn't, he wasn't even in love with me, okay, and I didn't know what to say to, like, anyone. For years. I maybe still don't. Except I want you to stay, and I'm not going to wake up one day, you know, and ask you to leave."

Lance bites his lip. "Why not?"

"Why -- Lance."

"I mean it. I don't, what if none of us -- what if none of us knows what to do with each other when everyone else isn't around to tell us when we fuck up? What if we fuck up and no one stops us?"

"We're older and wiser," Chris says.

"We're older."

"I'm older," Chris says, and he kisses Lance. He holds Lance's waist in his hands and Lance pulls Chris into his lap, wraps his arms around Chris' back. Chris says, "You should listen to me. I'm forty years old and they were the best years of my life, too, you know, but --"

"They were not," Lance says, breathing in Chris' ear.

"Yes, they were, what are you talking about?"

"Chris." Lance leans back a little. "Man, you're. You're forty. You're forty, not eighty. Say you only live to be eighty, alright. Say you live to be eighty, you're forty now, your life is half over. How are you so sure those aren't the best years of your life?"

"You know, for a guy who twelve seconds ago didn't know what the fuck he was talking about --"

"You convinced me," Lance says. "You don't want the best years of your life to be like this, here? With me?"

Lance looks so sure, looks so much like a guy who could walk into any room in the world and make you sign away everything for free, that Chris can barely breathe, let alone answer. He rests his nose on Lance's shoulder. Five months ago Lance was sitting on the plush carpet of some Los Angeles hotel trying not to drink and now he wants the best of years of their lives to be together. The old best years of Chris' life maybe ruined him for anything else. Maybe made this, made Lance, exactly what was supposed to be waiting for him in the long run.

Lance holds Chris' face in his hands until Chris says yes, says I do, makes promises that feel like the truth.

"Better late than never," Lance says.

Chris swallows. "But you might have to convince me again. And again. And, you know, my doctor said that my memory's only gonna get worse every year, so."

"I'm not going anywhere," Lance says.

  


 _So a guy walks into a bar. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," you say. He goes home with you. He stays. It turns out he's still pretty good at fixing things. He makes some plans and you think maybe he'll stick around a while. When he stays you're not entirely sure it's for you, but you're glad anyway. Things get worse, but nobody leaves._ _You stop being scared long enough to make things happen, and maybe they're a little more lasting than you'd thought. He goes away, but he comes back, too, and when he stays this time you know it's not because he couldn't be somewhere else._

No one goes anywhere and so two months later they wake up to the clock radio and Justin's first single in forever. It's loneliness and crying and nothing lets you hurt the ones you love like love and Chris slaps the snooze button with maybe a little too much force. Last week it was Justin on Entertainment Tonight saying Lance was his Sean Penn.

"I don't want to talk to him," Lance says, like they never got up and made up and went back to sleep and went about their business. Half his life and Chris thinks maybe they'll just have this conversation over and over again for the rest of it, it doesn't matter that Lance has had most of his shit shipped out there, that there are two desks now in Chris' big home office or a framed photo of them both at some party on his mother's mantle.

"You don't want to talk to him now," Chris says, running his tongue along furry teeth and rubbing his eyes. He's not sure he needs to be awake for this conversation but he's not sure it would hurt, either. "Will, will you want to talk to him when he's singing ten songs a night that are all about you? When he's standing on some stage in, like, Portland, and every city he goes to he makes the people there believe you were the great love of his life?"

"I don't. Chris. I don't need to hear him sing it live. I didn't need to hear it at all."

"But you will." Chris glares at the alarm clock and thinks in a different life, in a different eon, he would have thrown it across the room and thought that bitter taste in his mouth when it bounced on the carpet meant he felt better. He sighs. "We all -- the song is good. You know that. It's better than good."

"I mean I don't. I don't have to hear him put it down in some song to know what happened. I woke up next to him almost every morning for nine years and whether or not he goes fucking platinum on the first day I'm not gonna forget why I fell in love with him. And I really am not gonna forget why I left."

"I don't want you to go back," Chris says. Of all of them it's him and Lance who were always the most stubborn, about getting away from Lou even when other producers, other managers wouldn't return their calls. About quitting while they still could. "I don't want you to go back," Chris says again because it's not like he's gotten any less stubborn in his old age, middle-fucking-aged and by now it's just how he is. Lance knows that. Lance of anyone should know that by now.

"I want to be here," Lance says.

"I want you to stay," Chris says. Any way he says it it's true and he stretches his knees out slowly on the big bed.

Lance sighs and starts massaging Chris' calf, smooth slow circles like some choreographer taught them a million years ago. "Then what are we -- you can't fight over something when you both want the same thing."

"I want." Chris puts one hand over Lance's, moves it to just under his kneecap. Lance pushes back and forth with his thumb. "I want us to not keep fighting about this."

"Chris, we're gonna --" Lance looks startlingly awake and so, so present, so in this moment that Chris almost feels guilty for a moment that he can even feel his knee, let alone any part of his body that's not actually Lance's. Lance is awake and he says, "We're gonna fight. And you know, between us there's a lot of other people whose voices we're gonna hear every time we decide it's not worth giving up."

Lance says it and Chris hears Joey saying of course he's coming back, hears JC saying make sure he's okay. It's always been a juggling act and maybe now he knows, maybe finally he knows how to do that right. Lance rubs his hand up Chris' thigh in one long, sleek move. A decade of being best friends and maybe Justin hasn't written that part off, either. Chris says, "How is it going to be the best years of our lives if we can't just call up and say, hey, man, how the hell are you?"

Lance looks at Chris, looks out the window to where the early morning summer heat is slowly cooking the wide, flat lake. Chris looks too, and when he looks back Lance sniffs and scratches the back of his neck. Lance leans across Chris' side of the bed and switches the alarm clock from sleep to off. He taps his fingers on the nightstand, and Chris reaches out a hand to stroke Lance's thigh where it's still stretched out over the pillows. Lance ducks his head for a second. When he sits back up, the phone is in his hand, and he kisses Chris on the lips as he dials.

  


 _This is the joke: A guy walks into your life, takes a look around and decides to stay. This is the joke: You save each other from the best years of your life. This is the joke: It's not a joke at all. It's your life, and in the long run, you tell the story together._

  


**Author's Note:**

> [3.02/6.22.02]
> 
> Soundtrack: Crosby, Stills & Nash/You Don't Have to Cry. Joni Mitchell/Carey. Sheryl Crow/Over You. Eric Clapton/Cocaine. Ani DiFranco/Napoleon. Aimee Mann/You Could Make a Killing. The Cramps/Let's Get F*cked Up. Eddie Vedder/You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.


End file.
